Talks

This talk will introduce the audience to the changing representations of gay characters in films from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The films that will be explored include, but are not limited to, East Palace, West Palace (Zhang Yuan, 1996), Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997), and The River (Tsai Ming-liang, 1997). About the speaker: […]

On Sunday 7 June 2020, protestors marching to support the Black Lives Matter movement in Bristol tore down the statue of slave trader Edward Colston and threw it in the city’s harbour. This dramatic action thrust the city onto the global stage and put it at the forefront of an ongoing and bitter culture war. […]

A short, illustrated behind the scenes talk by professional cartoonist Polyp, revealing what goes into creating one of his climate cartoons, followed by a hands on workshop session helping aspiring artists create their very own climate cartoon! Free – booking required

As part of the Festival of Libraries, join poet Lemn Sissay OBE for an exciting talk for young people on how libraries have inspired him in his life. Lemn says: “A library is the loudest place on the high street, because books are bursting with very loud ideas! Yet it is where you can go […]

‘I live with the dread that one day when my young muscles rebel, can take no more stillness and the brutal confinement of my very self, I will stand and strip naked and burst out of my skin.’ Without Warning and Only Sometimes is Kit de Waal’s memoir of a childhood of opposites and extremes. Raised in […]

It's 1746 and Georgian London is not a safe place for a young Black man, especially one who has escaped slavery. So how does Charles Ignatius Sancho meet the King, write and play highly acclaimed music, become the first Black person to vote in Britain and lead the fight to end slavery? In his captivating debut novel, The Secret […]

One family, four decades, four funerals, one unfulfilled promise. Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, Damon Galgut joins us to discuss his masterpiece The Promise, a gripping, beautifully written family saga based around a farm in South Africa. Through the members of the Swart family, Damon explores personal and political change as the family splinters and […]

The bestselling and much-loved author of Brick Lane, Monica Ali visits MLF to celebrate her brilliant new novel Love Marriage, her first book in a decade. Yasmin’s engaged to fellow Junior Doctor Joe, but when they bring the two families together – one love-matched, long-married Bengali immigrants who thrive on home cooking and the other a single white […]

Award-winning BBC broadcaster Nihal Arthanayake brings a defibrillator to our ailing ability to connect through conversation. In Let’s Talk: How to Have Better Conversations, Nihal considers what’s happened to discourse, both public and private, over recent years. How Brexit, lockdown and social media have led to division, monologues, and a lack of in-person discussions. Through skills honed by […]

At first glance, it seems unlikely that the white English Victorian writer Charles Dickens and the Black American musician Prince Rogers Nelson have anything in common. But as two of Nick Hornby’s ‘artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work’ he set out to see whether there was anything […]