Author appearances, poetry and spoken word events in London this week
Thursday 17 October
Choose your branch of Daunt Books: either Marylebone for Penelope Lively talking about her memoir (£8, 7pm) or Fulham Road for writer and historian Adrian Tinniswood on a family of puritans who helped shape the New World (£5, 7pm)
Justin Cartwright reads from his new novel Lion Heart at West End Lane Books. Free, book via [email protected] / 020 7431 3770, 7.30pm
Peggy Riley and Morgan McCarthy join Scott Pack and Sarah Franklin for the Firestation Book Swap in Windsor. £5 / free with homemade cake, 7.45pm
Malorie Blackman is at Dulwich Library reading from and talking about her work. Free, prebook, 7pm
Liam Williams hosts a night of Stories at Invisible Dot, with Stewart Home, Diane Cardell and Nicholas Hogg. £8, 7.45pm
Steve Larkin and Vanessa Kisuule are the guests at stand up poetry night Bang Said the Gun in SE1. £7 / £5, 8pm
Take the kids to a family poetry evening at Swiss Cottage Library, to hear John Hegley, Grace Nichols, Wes Magee and Kathy Henderson. Free, 7pm
Bernadine Evaristo reads at the Wapping Project. £6, 7pm
Kate Adie talks about her WWI novel Fighting on the Home Front at Grosvenor House Literati. £20 (includes book), 7pm
Nick Barlay and Eve Harris talk about representation and living history in literature at the Wiener Library. Free, 1pm
Comedy and poetry go head to head at Stand Up And Slam at the Comedy Cafe in Shoreditch: Dan Simpson, Ben Norris, Amy McAllister and Adam Kammerling are on Team Poetry, Paul Sweeney, Daniel Simonsen, Kieran Boyd and Danny Ward are Team Comedy. £8, 8pm
Friday 18 October
Jan Blake tells the Malian story of The Old Woman, The Buffalo And The Lion Of Manding, with music from Kouame and Raymond Sereba, at the Albany in Deptford. £10 / £8, 7.30pm
Stephanie Gerra and Steve Keyworth host Jukebox Story, an evening of tales inspired by pop songs, at The Harrison Arms in Bloomsbury. Free, 7.30pm
Sue Johns, Angela Stoner and Lesley Hale are Dodo Modern Poets at the Poetry Cafe, all hosted by Patric Cunnane. £7 / £6, 8pm
Saturday 19 October
It's all Greece at the Southbank Centre. Historian Bettany Hughes and poet Katerina Iliopoulou host an afternoon of Greek fiction and poetry, with guests including Dionysis Kapsalis, Vassilis Amanatidis, Victoria Hislop and Ioanna Karystiani: £10, 2.30pm. Paul Mason talks about the economic crisis in Greece and the rest of Europe: £10, 5.30pm. And Katerina Vrana hosts an evening of literature, music and comedy: £10, 8pm
At the Bloomsbury Festival, DJ Taylor and Helen Smith talk about their novels set in the area (free, 3.30pm), or maybe go on a guided walk and find the poets of Bloomsbury (free, 11am) and keep an eye out for Simon Mole and Sonority Turner, gathering materials to create a found poem at Senate House, where Andrew Whitehead, Ken Worpole, and Cathi Unsworth will be resurrecting London's lost fictions (free, 2pm)
The Bloomsbury Festival also spills into the Welsh Centre, with a preview of the Dylan Thomas centenary (free, 2-5pm) and RACK press readings from five writers, including John Powell Ward and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch (free, 6pm)
Writer and screenwriter Catherine Johnson reads from her latest young adult novel Sawbones at Peckham Library. Free, prebook, 2pm
Pascale Petit and Lawand discuss the links between art and poetry at the Mosaic Rooms in SW5. Free, 12pm
Sunday 20 October
Apples and Snakes present poets Tommy Sissons, Jack Dean, Selina Nwulu, Lorna Meehan and Chris Stewart as the London leg of a national tour comes to the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green. £4 / £3, 7.30pm
LiTTLeMACHiNe set poetry to music at the Union Theatre in Madame Life, 'a poetical conjuration of love, death and music'. £10, 8pm
Part of the Artwalk Festival, Farrago runs a Poetry SLAM at the Arcola Theatre with Dudley Sutton, Idil Sukan, Katie Bonna and your host John Paul O'Neill. £8, 8pm
Monday 21 October
Philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster take on Hamlet at the London Review Bookshop. £10, 7pm
Sally Pomme Clayton performs the story of Eros and Psyche at the Soho Theatre. £9 / £7, 8pm
Patrick Marnham and Manu Riche discuss Snake Dance in book and film forms - about the story of the construction and consequences of the creation of the atomic bomb - at the Southbank Centre. £10, 7.45pm
Hear Celtic myths reworked in New Stories from the Mabinogion at Somerset House, with readings from Owen Sheers, Trezza Azzopardi, Russell Celyn Jones, Tishani Doshi, Cynan Jones and more. £7, 7pm
Keats House Poets present a Human Rights Poetry Slam at Senate House, judged by Musa Okwonga and Deanna Rodger (free, 4pm), and later in the same venue Ruth Padel, James Byrne, Chrissie Gittins and David Lee Morgan read at the launch of poetry anthology In Protest: 150 Poems for Human Rights (free, 6pm)
Tuesday 22 October
Don Share and Maurice Riordan talk over Ezra Pound's 'A Few Don'ts' and whether poets need a new set of guiding principles, at Keats House. £6 / £5, 7pm
Neil Spring talks about his spooky debut novel The Ghost Hunters, at Foyles. Free but prebook, 6.30pm
Poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw and novelist Ali Smith talk about truth at the Twentieth Century Theatre in Westbourne Grove, to mark the Poetry School's 16th birthday. £10, 7pm
Sathnam Sanghera and Damian Barr talk about being on the margins of contemporary Britain in a South Asian Literature pre-Festival event at Asia House. £10 / £8, 6.45pm
Jonathan Harvey is top of the bill for salon Polari at the Southbank Centre, with Mo Foster, Diriye Osman, Lyn Guest de Swarte and Robyn Vinten. £5, 7.45pm
Simon Singh unveils the maths secrets behind The Simpsons, at the Southbank Centre. £10, 7.45pm
Still at the Southbank Centre, join in a shared reading of WH Auden and Christopher Isherwood's The Dog Beneath the Skin. £5, 8pm
Elizabeth Gilbert discusses The Signature of All Things at the Bloomsbury Institute Book Club. £30 (includes book), 6.30pm
Peter Daniels will read and discuss his translations of poems by Vladislav Khodasevich with Martin Sixsmith, at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury. Free, 7pm
Niall O'Sullivan hosts the Poetry Cafe's weekly open mic night, Poetry Unplugged. £5 / £4, 7.30pm
Wednesday 23 October
Matt Haynes and Jude Rogers of Smoke magazine read from their book From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea at Bookseller Crow on the Hill in Crystal Palace. £3, 7.30pm
Marcus Chown is at Foyles discussing The Big Stuff of how the world works. We're still gaping at his book on quantum physics: an excellent popular science writer. £5 / £3, 6.30pm
Simon Garfield and Shaun Usher (of Letters of Note) talk about some of the world's most unusual and inspiring letters at Waterstones Piccadilly. £5 / £3, 6.30pm
There's another shared audience reading at the Southbank Centre, this time of Ken Smith's Fox Running. £5, 8pm
Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji reads from and talks about his work at the Mosaic Rooms, in both Arabic and English. Free, 7pm
Experience poetry films and spoken word guests and maybe be moved to have a go yourself at Jawdance at Rich Mix in Shoreditch. Free, 7.30pm
Follow @LondonistLit for our pick of that day’s literary events.
