Date/Time: Saturday, 17th November. 10:30 am – 5:00 pm
Location: Nottingham Mechanics Institute
Nottingham’s second radical bookfair, organised by Five Leaves Bookshop, featuring stalls by national and local publishers, second-hand booksellers and a full supporting programme throughout the day. Free, with free events. No need to book.
Speakers/events include:
11.00-12.00
“Diversity in children’s picture books”, with Troy Jenkinson (author of The Best Mummy Snails in the Whole Wide World, an LGBT children’s book) and Latina illustrator Erika Meza
It’s the work, the work, the working life… and how do we organise to make things better? Build the old unions, or create new? The recent long university strike and the success of independent unions in “organising the unorganisable” show what might be possible. Join the discussion with Alan Tuckman (author of Kettling the Unions)
12.15-1.15
Iain McKay on “Modern Science and Anarchy” – the life and work of Peter Kropotkin, prince, anarchist, geographer, whose funeral was the last public anarchist demonstration in Russia under the Bolsheviks.
Familiar Stranger: a life between two islands, a memoir by Bill Schwartz and the late Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist of the New Left, and sociologist
1.30-2.30
Amrit Wilson on Finding a Voice: Asian women in Britain to mark the new edition of this landmark book
Owen Hatherley on his adventures travelling around eleven countries of the former Soviet Union – “Daffodils for Wordsworth. Deprivation for Larkin. A trashed tower block surrounded by a toxic landscape pocked with rust-pitted Ladas in a forgotten oblast 2,000 miles from Moscow for Hatherley.” – Jonathan Meades
2.45-3.45
Singing for Our Lives: Stories from the Street Choirs centres on more than 40 oral histories gathered from members of the UK’s many street choirs, supported by Nottingham Clarion Choir
The Fire Now: anti-racist scholarship in times of explicit racial violence, with Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Azeezat Johnson (editors) and Viji Kuppan (contributor)
4.00-5.00
Paul Hegarty gives a sound-illustrated talk on Peter Gabriel, singer-songwriter, record producer and activist
Assembly Lines – poetry of the workplace by Jane Commane and Neil Fulwood. Jane runs Nine Arches Press, a poetry specialist press, and her own latest collection is from Bloodaxe. Neil is the author of No Avoiding It, a Nottingham geography of work and class
