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Southbank Centre's London Literature Festival is Living In Future Times - SciFiNow

Southbank Centre’s London Literature Festival is Living In Future Times

2016 London Literature Festival announces awesome sci-fi + YA events

The theme for 2016’s London Literature Festival has been announced as ‘Living In Future Times,’ which is fantastic news for genre fans.

Running from 5-16 October, the festival offers some fantastic genre-focused events, ranging from a celebration of David Bowie’s life and legacy, a reading of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, the launch for Margaret Atwood’s new book and days focusing on modern science fiction and YA.

The events that we’re particularly excited about are:

5 October: “Marking 150 years since HG Wells’ birth, a reading of his classic Sci-Fi novel The Time Machine opens the festival and a discussion on Wells’ relationships with women is broadcast live from the Clore Ballroom at Royal Festival Hall on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking.”

6 October: “World-renowned writer Margaret Atwood launches and discusses her new novel, Hag-Seed, a reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

7 October: “Authors including biographer Paul Morley celebrate and explore David Bowie‘s life and legacy in a free event.”

10 October: “Erika Wagner joins Neel Mukherjee and Salley Vickers to explore the work of Alan Garner whose novels from The Weirdstone of Brisingamen to Red Shift and beyond have fascinated and inspired readers and writers alike for more than fifty years.”

15 October: “A day featuring the best international writers of science-fiction including Hassan Blasim, Lauren Beukes, Xiaolu Guo and Cixin Liu.”

15-16 October: “Young Adult Literature Weekender offers more opportunities than ever before to the next generation of writers. Featuring the most exciting YA novelists, bloggers, vloggers, poets and spoken word artists from rising stars to legends of YA, such as Sara Barnard, Malorie Blackman, Holly Bourne, Juno Dawson, Sally Green, Sungju Lee, Hollie McNish and Harriet Reuter Hapgood.

16 October: “In an exclusive preview event before publication, Naomi Alderman reads from her new novel The Power (16 October), telling the story of four girls and women who struggle against daily oppressions and sexism until one day they find their lives radically altered by the power to inflict lightning bolts of pain, and even death, at the flick of their fingers.”

There’s also some very exciting events that sit outside our genre purview, including a screening of Louis Theroux’ Scientology documentary with the filmmaker in attendance for a Q&A, talks with scientists like Richard Dawkins Marcus Du Sautoy and Ed Yong, and readings from crowd-funded anthology The Good Immigrant (which includes writers like Riz Ahmed, Chimene Suleyman and Kieran Yates).

For more information about these events, visit the Southbank Centre website.

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