Recent Events I’ve hosted
I regularly host events for Lancaster Litfest and other organisations. Most recently, the launch of Sophie Canon’s Long Going and the launch of Jenn Ashworth’s The Parallel Path.
Bright Club Stand Up Comedy
In November 2023, I took part in Bright Club, the comedy night where academics share their research as stand up comedy. Watch it here. I learned a lot about comic timing, the rule of three, and that comedy doesn’t need to be rushed.
Reading at the International Cultic Studies Conference in Louisville
In July 2023, I read sections from my memoir, which became the scenes I’d develop into my solo show, A Maternal Exorcism. Here, I’m reading to the whole audience at the end of the conference in Louisville. I received a standing ovation. Many audience members were also survivors of cults and high control groups.
Reading with The Quiet Compare
In May 2022, I performed moments from being a teenager in the 1990s as part of The Quiet Compere Tour at The West End Playhouse in Morecambe. These are early days of thinking through my story and how I might perform it.
ManCaster Rocks
With writers from Lancaster and Manchester, I read with Eoghan Walls, Peter Humphries and Maria Roberts in October 2021. As part of building my performance skills, I performed a scene from my memoir dressed like a Jehovah’s Witness Elder. It was fun performing the male power I was denied growing up. It’s a scene
Big Book Weekend – a 3-day virtual festival that brings together the best of British Book Festivals cancelled due to the coronavirus.
Bidisha, Luan Goldie and Zoe Lambert with Joelle Taylor
11 am 10 May 2020
The anthology Resist: Stories of Uprising charts two thousand years of British resistance, from Boudica to Blair Peach, from the Battle of Cable Street to the protests after the Grenfell Tower Fire. This panel will examine the history of women’s rebellion in Britain, by focusing on three works from the collection covering Boudica, the Ford Dagenham Women’s Strike, and Seeds of Hope. The discussion will be moderated by Joelle Taylor, who hitched a ride to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp from her home in Lancashire as a teenager, where she was arrested for taking direct political action.
29 February 2020 Hong Kong Rocks
Launch of Hong Kong Rocks by Pete Humphreys
Join Lancaster-based author Peter Humphreys for the launch of his satirical thriller HONG KONG ROCKS (Proverse) at The Gregson’s Olive Bar this Saturday.
A Proverse Prize finalist, Humphreys’ first published novel offers reflections on home, identity, relationships and protest within a Hong Kong brought vividly to life by his words.
Beginning at 6.30pm with drinks and snacks, Zoe Lambert (Comma Press) from Lancaster University’s Creative Writing school will conduct a Q&A with the author around 7pm. Short readings from the novel will be interspersed with the Q&As.
BIDISHA, ELEY WILLIAMS, ZOE LAMBERT AND RA PAGE
RESIST: STORIES OF PROTEST
Hay Festival 2019,
We live in a golden era of protest. From the anti-gun rallies in the US to the March of Return demos in Palestine, people are taking to the streets and standing up to governments that have fallen out of step with the popular mood. Resist is the second instalment of a series of commissions challenging authors to reimagine key moments of British protest through fiction, while working closely with historians, crowd scientists and eye-witnesses to maximise their historical accuracy. Bidisha reimagines Boudica’s revolt against the Romans, Eley Williams rewrites the Rebecca Riots and Zoe Lambert has written about the Seeds of Hope protest. All these stories offer a grassroots perspective on very hard-won grassroots progress.
We Were Strangers Launch at Waterstones, Deansgate
Reading at the Manchester launch event are flash fiction pioneer and author David Gaffney, whose first graphic novel The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head, came out earlier this year on US publisher Top Shelf; Zoe Lambert, who has an acclaimed collection, The War Tour, out with Comma Press; Sophie Mackintosh, winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and currently on the Man Booker longlist for her debut novel, The Water Cure, and novelist and short story writer Nicholas Royle, whose third short story collection, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, just came out and whose second collection, Ornithology, was the first book to be published by Confingo and was recently longlisted for the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
Other events I’ve hosted include,
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