Book Grocer: 6-12 April

Rachel Holdsworth
By Rachel Holdsworth Last edited 155 months ago
Book Grocer: 6-12 April

The week ahead in literary London

Wednesday: Weirdly, there are still tickets left for Jonathan Coe's appearance at Kings Place for the Guardian Review Book Club (7pm, £9.50). Make this less weird and go.

Nina Power, Aaron Peters, Anthony Barnett, Jonathan Moses and Sophie Burge discuss Fight Back!, a book made up of blog posts and articles about the student demonstrations, at Housmans (7pm, £3).

Simon Winchester tells the story of the Atlantic at the Travel Bookshop (7pm, £5).

The Free the Word Festival (appropriately) at the Free Word Centre starts with a free event - the latest issue of Modern Poetry in Translation looks at the relationship between poetry and the state. Stephen Watts, Sasha Dugdale, Martina Thomson, Chris Beckett, Michael Foley and MPT's editors David and Helen Constantine consider (6.30pm, free but booking essential).

Head to the Barbican library to hear what Lord Byron, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Christina Rossetti, Wendy Cope and John Keats thought about marriage (6.30pm, free).

Celebrate 25 years of The North magazine and The Book and Pamphlet Competition at the Southbank Centre (8pm, free).

Thursday: The London Word Festival is here again, hooray! Its starting off with the Cybraphon at RichMix - go see it, tweet it, make it happy (11am-5pm, free, until 20th April).

Wendy Cope, Andrew Motion, Don Paterson and Clive James are at the Tabernacle from 7pm (£25 / £12.50).

David Lodge discusses his 'bio-novel' of HG Wells at the London Review Bookshop (7pm, £6).

Check out the Poetry Society's Knitted Poem at the Museum of Childhood between 6-9pm.

Friday: Dominique Manotti, Margie Orford, Nii Ayikwei Parkes and Rosie Goldsmith debate crime writing at the Free the Word Festival (6.30pm, £8 / £5).

We loved The Quiet Volume, at the Bishopsgate Institute Library today, Monday and Tuesday for the London Word Festival. Grab a friend and head down (£12 for two).

John Citizen invites Patric Cunnane, Ross Sutherland, Heather Taylor and Kate Potts to Tall Lighthouse at the Poetry Cafe (8pm, £5 / £4).

Ed Parshotham hosts Elizabeth Darcy Jones for Poetry Jam at the Tea Box (8pm, free).

Isobel Dixon, David Kinloch, Peter McCarey and Richard Price read new work at The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place (7pm).

Saturday: Back at the Free the Word Festival, Danny Morrison, German Sadulaev and Easterine Kire Iralu talk about being a writer within a turbulent homeland (2pm, £8 / £5), Gabriel Josipovici, Geoff Dyer and Dubravka Ugresic wonder whether the novel needs to reinvent itself (4pm, £8 / £5) and Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Elif Shafak and Hisham Matar look at how writers make and unmake history (7pm, £8 / £5).

Hannah Jane Walker sifts apologies with a small audience at the Toynbee Arts Cafe Bar, part of the London Word Festival (2pm & 5pm, Saturday and Sunday, £8).

Niki Orfanou performs a poetic tale about the consequences of a child's disappearance at the Poetry Cafe (7.30pm, £5).

Sunday: Enjoy some free lunchtime bites from authors Margie Orford, Dubravka Ugresic and German Sadulaev at the Free Word Centre (1pm, free but booking essential), and then Rachel Holmes, Romesh Gunesekera and Gillian Slovo debate the increasingly blurry line between politics and art (5pm, £8 / £5).

We're not sure James Frey does uncontroversial. He's talking about his new book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, at Lutyens & Rubinstein (6pm, £5).

You've still got time to examine your apologies at the London Word Festival (2pm & 5pm, £8).

Fran Landesman, Indigo Williams, E. Amato and Niall Spooner-Harvey join Jumoke Fashola at Ronnie Scott's for Jazz Verse Jukebox (7pm, £7).

Monday: Kevin Barry, Nat Segnit and Henry Sutton join Emma Young for The Book Stops Here at the Alley Cat on Denmark Street (8pm, free).

Chechen German Sadulaev and Russian Zakhar Prilepin talk with Tony Wood and Oliver Bullough about national identity and Russian fiction, at the London Review Bookshop (7pm, £6).

Russia's Andrei Bitov is in conversation with John O'Brien about his work at the Free Word Centre (7pm, £6 / £3).

Continuing the Russian theme at the Southbank Centre is Russia-obsessed Elif Batuman. She's talking to Pavel Basinsky about Russian writing today (7.45pm, £8).

Alec Bell hosts open mic night Monday Musings at the Poetry Cafe (7.30pm).

Tuesday: The first big performance night of the London Word Festival comes from Robin Ince, hosting Books vs Cigarettes with Stuart Evers, John-Luke Roberts, Matthew Crosby, Joanna Neary, Rich Sandling, Martin Austwick and Ben Moor debating Orwell's proposition that reading is not necessarily more exciting than having a fag or going to the pub (7pm, £8 / £10).

Niall O'Sullivan hosts Poetry Unplugged at the Poetry Cafe (7.30pm, £4 / £3).

The London Cycling Book Club meets at Look Mum No Hands to read William Fotheringham's Put Me Back on my Bike (7pm).

Last Updated 06 April 2011