Friday 13 March 2020

Huddersfield Literature Festival events (coronavirus update)

With details of which events are cancelled, and which will go ahead:

We are following Government guidance on the Coronavirus outbreak and will continue to monitor the situation and take official advice as it is presented. For further information see: https://www.huddlitfest.org.uk/about-us/coronavirus/. Meanwhile, please note the following changes to our programme:

Workshop: Fiery Flash Fiction with Meg Pokrass, 21 March - cancelled
Workshop: Alice in Wonderland Tote Bags, 28 March - cancelled
Singing in the Rain with Rachel Kelly, 19 March - this event will go ahead but the author will be conducting her talk remotely - we will show her slides on a screen at the venue and she will give her talk via Skype on a computer screen.

Please note: full refunds will be offered to ticket holders for cancelled events.

Join us for our free launch

Refreshments, plus a talk from British/Trinidadian writer

Monique Roffey

Wednesday 18 March, 6pm

Heritage Quay University of Huddersfield HD1 3DH
FREE EVENT (optional £3 donation) - PLEASE BOOK IN ADVANCE

BOOK HERE

6pm Drinks and view the new Anne Brontë exhibition at Heritage Quay
6.30pm Find out about our events
6.45pm Author Talk: Monique Roffey: The Mermaid of Black Conch

Monique Roffey is an award-winning Trinidad-born British writer of novels, essays, a memoir and literary journalism. Shortlisted for several major awards, she won the OCM BOCAS Award for Caribbean Literature for her novel Archipelago.

Her sixth novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, is set in 1976 in a tiny Caribbean village at the start of the rainy season. A fisherman encounters a beautiful woman transformed into a mermaid. Returned to land, she finds a way to survive, heal and live again.

Also on Wednesday 18 March
Discovering Anne Brontë 1.45pm-5.45pm
Oastler building, University of Huddersfield
Free - booking required
BOOK HERE

1.45pm-2.45pm
Anne Brontë Reimagined
Book launch: Adelle Hay In Conversation with Claire O’Callaghan.

3pm-4.15pm
To Be Undone: Anne’s last days
Rehearsed reading of a play by award-winning poet and writer Wendy Pratt, directed by Mollie Wood.

4.30pm-5.45pm
Anne Brontë at 200
Panel discussion with Claire O’Callaghan, Wendy Pratt, Adelle Hay, Mollie Wood and Lauren Livesey, Audience Development Officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Chaired by Michael Stewart.

Please then head over to Heritage Quay for:
6pm Drinks and view the new Anne Brontë exhibition plus HLF launch

Can You Hear Me?
A paramedic's encounters with life and death

Thursday 19 March 7pm-8pm
Oastler Building, University of Huddersfield HD1 3DH
Age guidance 16+

A fascinating and dramatic insight into the life of an ambulance paramedic. Every day, Jake Jones faces the challenges of one of the most demanding and important jobs anyone can do.

Can You Hear Me? – the first thing he says when he arrives on the scene – is a medical memoir with a difference, dealing with real people and the chaos, intensity and occasional beauty of life on the front-line of medicine in the UK.

Tickets: £5 (£3 concessions)

BOOK HERE

Sponsored by:

Celebrating Toni Morrison

Friday 20 March, 7pm

Syngenta Cellar, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Queen Street HD1 2SP

Dialogue Books’ authors, Yvonne Battle-Felton and Paul Mendez celebrate the life and work of Toni Morrison, one of the greatest and most celebrated writers of her era, who passed away in August 2019. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was the author of 11 highly acclaimed novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

The event will be chaired by writer and educator Anita Franklin.

Yvonne Battle-Felton was the winner of a Northern Writers’ Award in 2017 for her novel, Remembered, which has drawn comparisons with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.