Events

Tag: #nonfiction

Workshop: Celebrating Life Stories

Book this workshop with Paul Burston’s Workshop: What’s Your Story (Saturday 9 May at 1.30pm) and save! Just choose the option of both workshops when you purchase your ticket. 

 

Celebrating Your Life Stories – with compelling writing is a fun, uplifting and life-affirming workshop, to introduce you to creative non-fiction writing. All welcome (age 16+), no previous writing experience required. 

 

With Juliet Thomas – Creative Coach, & Founder of From Seed To Sky – Nurturing ideas into powerful realities… 

Juliet is passionate about encouraging everyone to tap into their inner creativity and thereby improve mental health, foster new skills, create connections, build confidence and feel proud of trying something new. 

 

Let’s celebrate together 

Too often we look back on our life and think about the tough parts, the challenges we have gotten through and whilst these are important, defining moments, what about the good parts, the celebratory moments, the parts that bring us pure joy? In this session we will pause to reflect and celebrate these moments, writing and expressing your story, your way, as part of the celebrations of 20th anniversary of Huddersfield Literature Festival! 

 

We will be exploring creative non-fiction writing to share your story 

This specific, up-and-coming genre, allows you to tell your truthful story in the most engaging and colourful way. It’s factually accurate writing that’s presented in a compelling, imaginative, and narrative style.  

 

This 2-hour workshop will include: 

 

  • Intro to creative non-fiction writing, sharing some published examples 
  • Ice breaker in partners – share a joyous moment to each other in one intriguing sentence 
  • Take a truthful joyous micro moment and write about it in no more than 250 words 
  • Take a truthful celebratory major memory and begin a blog, article,or a bigger project with this memory 
  • Sharing your writing pieces (only if you are comfortable doing so) 
  • Refreshments  

 

 You will leave: 

  • Happy that you have given yourself the gift of some creative writing time 
  • Having taken the time to focus on the positives in life, the special moments that make you smile  
  • Uplifted from a creative afternoon, where you have achieved unique, personal pieces of writing to feel proud of 

 

You can find out more about Juliet @fromseed_tosky on Instagram 

 

Saturday 9 May 

11am-1pm 

Amped, 29 Zetland St, HD1 2RD 

£12 (£10 conc), free for essential carers accompanying a ticket holder 

Age guidance: 16+ 

Access Guide: https://www.accessable.co.uk/huddersfield-literature-festival/access-guides/amped 

 

Book tickets

 

Access: if you have specific access needs or seating preferences, please contact our Admin team at info@huddlitfest.org.uk with your request.

Concession & Carers: For further information on concession and essential carer tickets, please visit our FAQ’s page. 

Eventbrite note: When purchasing tickets please download the Eventbrite ‘app’ or ‘create an Eventbrite account’. This will facilitate quicker access to your tickets.

Polari: Celebrating LGBTQ+ Writing Talent

Enjoy entertaining, heartwarming and thought-provoking performances from a diverse and talented line-up of LGBTQ+ writers.  

 

Hosted by bestselling author and journalist Paul Burston, the evening will showcase the work of the QPOC poet, artist and teacher Jay Gadhia, the poet and theatre maker Roma Havers, and the writer, researcher and historian Jane Traies. 

 

The event will start at 7pm with a 15-minute break, approx finish time 8.45pm.  

 

Other events with these writers: Jane Traies will also take part in a Q&A on her film 3,000 Lesbians Go to York which we are showing on Saturday 9 May, and Paul Burston will be teaching a creative writing workshop, also on Saturday 9 May. See our Events page for more details. 

 

About Polari Founded by author and journalist Paul Burston in a bar in Soho in 2007, award-winning literary salon Polari showcases and celebrates the best in LGBTQ+ poetry and writing. The Polari Prize is the UK’s only book prize for LGBTQ+ writing. It comprises three awards: Book of the Year, Debut book and children’s/YA prize. 

 

Paul Burston is curator and host of award-winning LGBTQ+ literary salon Polari and founder of the Polari Prize book awards for LGBTQ+ writers. In 2016, he featured in the British Council’s Global List of ‘33 visionary people promoting freedom, equality and LGBT rights around the world’. Paul is the author of six novels and five non-fiction books, and the editor of two short-story collections. His bestselling memoir We Can Be Heroes: A Survivor’s Story was published in 2023. 

 

Jay Gadhia is a QPOC poet, artist and teacher. He has always written but has only recently developed his spoken word / performance poetry. His artwork and poetry tend to focus on the Asian queer experience and explore cultural and racial history. A great deal of his work focusses on faith, as well as unpicking the complications of relationships. 

 

Roma Havers is a queer poet, theatre-maker and unsolicited go-go dancer – from your hometown but living in Manchester with their partner, allotment and every stone they’ve ever pocketed. Commissioned by Orchestra’s Live, Manchester City of Literature and Manchester Museum, among many others, they are known for their ‘joyful, communal and tender’ work. They have been published in Ink Sweat and Tears, Verve Poetry Prize (Shortlisted), The North and Under the Radar. Alongside their poetry work, they have produced writer development programmes, mentored many poets and produced work for performance including their show LOB, which toured the North West and Belfast in 2022, with their play Helmet with Laughter Lines being longlisted for the Bruntwood Playwriting prize the same year. They were winner of the 2024 Northern Writers’ Award for Poetry with The Natural Way, their first collection with Carcanet Press. 

 

Jane Traies is a queer historian, writer and storyteller whose work focuses on preserving the stories of marginalised women’s lives. Her best-known book, Now You See Me, is a collection of older lesbian life stories. Her second life-history collection, Free to Be Me, captures the stories of a group of lesbian and bisexual women seeking asylum in the UK. Writing jointly with Jacky Bratton, Jane is also half of the sapphic historical novelist Jay Taverner. Their latest title, Liberty, is the fourth adventure in the ‘Brynsquilver’ series. Jane’s latest book, Three Thousand Lesbians Go to York, tells the story of the York Lesbian Arts Festival, the UK’s largest and longest lasting gathering of lesbian, bi and queer women, and of Libertas!, the bookshop that founded it. A treasure trove of inclusive queer history, 3000 Lesbians includes the memories of Jackie Kay, Stella Duffy, Sarah Waters, Val McDermid, Horse McDonald, festival founder Jenny Roberts and many others who attended or organised the festival. 

 

Friday 8 May  

7pm-8.45pm 

Amped, 29 Zetland St, HD1 2RA 

£9 (£7 conc), free for University of Huddersfield staff and students & essential carers accompanying a ticket holder.

Age Guidance: 16+ 

Access Guide: https://www.accessable.co.uk/huddersfield-literature-festival/access-guides/amped 

Book tickets

 

Access: if you have specific access needs or seating preferences, please contact our Admin team at info@huddlitfest.org.uk with your request.

Concession & Carers: For further information on concession and essential carer tickets, please visit our FAQ’s page. 

Eventbrite note: When purchasing tickets please download the Eventbrite ‘app’ or ‘create an Eventbrite account’. This will facilitate quicker access to your tickets.

We Came By Sea

Every day and every night when the sea was calm they came, and most days the newspapers and the websites said the same thing: ‘migrants’ in ‘small boats’ were crossing the English Channel. Rescuers were ‘overwhelmed’, coastal towns were ‘up in arms’. Over and over, the headlines and the photographs told us this story. 

 

But no story has only one side, as Horatio Clare discovered when he began his journeys between Dover and Calais, where he met and listened to the volunteers who help thousands of people every year, from the lifeboat crews mounting operations to the countless unrecognised, uncelebrated British people who are giving their all to help the vulnerable and desperate. 

 

We Came by Sea bears witness to hope and humanity. It is a journey through an unexamined nation – a nation which is every bit as great and good as the people in the dinghies believe it to be. This is not the story that we have been told, but it is a true story. 

 

Shortlisted for the Nero Book Awards 2025.  

 

Horatio Clare is a critically acclaimed author and journalist. His first book, Running for the Hills, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second book, Truant, was heralded by The Irish Times as a ‘stunningly well-written memoir.’ A Single Swallow was shortlisted for the Dolman Travel Book of the Year while Down to the Sea in Ships won the Stanford-Dolman Travel Book of the Year in 2015. Horatio’s first book for children, Aubrey and the Terrible Yoot, won the Branford Boase Award for debut children’s book. He has written two books about mental health: Heavy Light and Your Journey Your Way. Previously with Little Toller books Horatio has published Orison for a Curlew and Something of his Art. He lives in West Yorkshire. 

 

Praise for We Came by Sea 

 

“I would read anything Horatio Clare wrote. His prose is always brilliant, and by turns funny, furious and heart-piercingly compassionate. He lights up – no, he scintillates – any subject that finds itself in receipt of the gift of his attention.”   

Robert Macfarlane 

 

“It feels comforting and right to have a writer of Clare’s skill turn attention to this topic, and he does not avoid referencing corruption and other wrongdoing by those in power.”  

Sally Hayden, The Irish Times 

 

“[Clare’s] job, executed wonderfully well, is to help us to think calmly and intelligently about those arriving in small boats, to consider giving them a chance and to recognise that we have more in common with them than we might imagine.”  

Maggie Fergusson, The Spectator 

 

Saturday 9 May 

2pm-3pm 

Attic, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Queen Street HD1 2SP 

£8 (£7 conc) free ticket for University of Huddersfield staff and students and essential carers accompanying a ticket holder.

Age guidance: 16+ 

Access Guide: https://www.thelbt.org/your-visit/access/  

Book tickets

Access: if you have specific access needs or seating preferences, please contact our Admin team at info@huddlitfest.org.uk with your request.

Concession & Carers: For further information on concession and essential carer tickets, please visit our FAQ’s page. 

Eventbrite note: When purchasing tickets please download the Eventbrite ‘app’ or ‘create an Eventbrite account’. This will facilitate quicker access to your tickets.