BookBound 2020: an antiviral literary festival
bringing authors and readers together online for 7 days of stories and conversation
Monday 27 April to Sunday 3 May 2020
Add to CalendarBookBound 2020 is a new, not-for-profit literary festival, bringing authors and book-lovers together online for 7 days of exciting events, including readings, story-times and live author-to-author conversations.
While the majority of BookBound 2020’s team is based in the UK, the festival’s mission is to make connections and support new voices in Britain and around the world.
Proudly partnered with Wasafiri Magazine (based at QMUL), BookBound 2020 offers a global platform for big names, emerging authors and all lovers of literature to come together during this period of international uncertainty and isolation.
Throughout the festival period, speakers will be championing their favourite independent bookshops, and encouraging remote support for the industry while Covid-19 restrictions remain in place.
Viewers will also be able to help their local bookshops through a special arrangement between BookBound 2020 and the online bookseller Hive.
Here’s 10 writers we’re most looking forward to hear from including some QMUL connections:
Octavia Bright
Octavia is a writer and co-host of the New York Times and Guardian-recommended literary podcast Literary Friction. She holds a PhD from UCL, where her research focused on hysteria and desire. She has written criticism, fiction, journalism and essays for a variety of publications including Elephant, Orlando, Somesuch Stories, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar and The White Review. She has written librettos for several musical collaborations, which have been performed at Snape Maltings, Kings Place London and LSO St Luke’s.
Wed 29 April | 5.30pm BST
Caleb Femi
Caleb is an acclaimed London artist. Featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture, he uses music and film to push the boundaries of poetry. Stream SLOG, Caleb’s latest body of work, and preorder his debut collection POOR (Penguin, July 2020).
Fri 1 May | 5.30pm BST
Niven Govinden
Niven is the author of four previous novels, most recently All The Days And Nights which was longlisted for the Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize. His second novel Graffiti My Soul is about to go into film production. His third novel Black Bread White Beer won the 2013 Fiction Uncovered Prize. He was a judge for the 2017 4th Estate/Guardian B4ME Prize. This Brutal House was shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize 2019.
Sat 2 May | 9.15pm BST
Intisar Khanani
Intisar grew up a nomad and world traveller. She has lived in five different US states as well as in Jeddah on the coast of the Red Sea. Until recently, Intisar wrote grants and developed projects to address community health with the Cincinnati Health Department, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on her two passions: raising her family and writing fantasy. Her works include The Sunbolt Chronicles and Thorn.
Sun 3 May | 5.30pm BST
David Lammy
David was born in London to Guianese parents and has served as the MP for Tottenham since 2000. He was the first black Briton to study at Harvard Law School and before entering politics practised as a barrister. David served as a minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. His first book, Out of the Ashes: Britain after the Riots, was published to widespread acclaim. Tribes: How Our Need to Belong Can Make or Break Society, is out now.
Sat 2 May | 7.15pm BST hosted by Wasafiri Magazine’s Malachi McIntosh
Georgina Lawton
Georgina is a 27-year-old author, journalist and travel writer. A former Guardian Weekend columnist, her first book, Raceless, a memoir on family and identity, will be released in September 2020 with Sphere (UK) and Harper Collins (US). Her writing and speaking has been featured in: The Independent, Sky News, Ref29, Stylist, BBC Newsnight, Travel + Leisure, VICE, Suitcase, and Time Out London.
Tue 28 April | 5.30pm BST
Amber Massie-Blomfield
Amber Massie-Blomfield is a creative nonfiction writer and arts producer. She has written for titles including The Independent,The Guardian, The Stage and Exeunt. Her first book, Twenty Theatres to See Before You Die was published in 2018 (Penned in the Margins).
Wed 29 April | 7.15pm BST
Malachi McIntosh
Malachi is Editor and Publishing Director of Wasafiri magazine. Along with his books Emigration and Caribbean Literature, and Beyond Calypso: Re-Reading Samuel Selvon, his writing has appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, the Guardian, The Journal of Romance Studies, Research in African Literatures, Under the Radar, and The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature, among others. Prior to joining Wasafiri he was co-lead of the three-times award-winning Our Migration Story project.
Sat 2 May | 7.15pm BST
Lola Olufemi
Lola is a black feminist writer, organiser and researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relation to liberated futures. She is the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019), author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020) and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Sun 3 May | 7.15pm BST
Susan Rudy
Susan is Director of the Centre for Poetry in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Her research investigates the intersections between experimental writing, radical feminist theory, and gender ontoformativity. With Dr Georgina Colby, she founded SALON – LONDON: a site for responding to the present through women’s experimental writing, and is currently working with collaborators across the UK to establish a Queer Poetics Research Network at Queen Mary’s Centre for Poetry.
Thurs 30 April | 9.15pm BST
