An Evening with Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh joins the team to launch his latest novel, Men In Love, the immediate sequel to Trainspotting, continuing the stories of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie!

Set in the late 1980s and early ’90s against the backdrop of rave culture, Men In Love follows the iconic Trainspotting crew through the dying days of Thatcher’s Britain as they do what they can to feel alive, all while asking themselves whether falling in love is the answer to their problems, or just another futile quest?

Irvine will be in conversation with Peter Hooton, lead singer of The Farm, to discuss returning to the boys, filling in this gap in their stories, and his own memories of Edinburgh in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as signing copies of Men In Love.

An Audience with Pete Waterman

The Hitmaker Behind Kylie, Rick Astley & Steps – Live in Conversation!

Legendary record producer behind countless UK chart hits.

• Stories from Top of the Pops, Stock Aitken Waterman days, and 80s/90s pop royalty.
• Behind-the-scenes anecdotes that music fans won’t hear anywhere else.

All proceeds support the Jack Ashley Mural Appeal – honouring a local hero through public art.

The Queen’s Reading Room: Readin...

They’re thrilled to invite you to an extraordinary evening at ACC Liverpool as part of the International Festival of Neuroscience. Join us on Monday, April 28th from 6:30-7:30pm for an exclusive public lecture exploring the fascinating science behind how reading shapes our minds.

The Queen’s Reading Room presents an enlightening discussion on how literature influences the way we think, feel, speak, and even sleep – featuring an exceptional panel of speakers:

• Ann Cleeves OBE – Bestselling author behind TV’s beloved crime dramas Vera and Shetland
• Professor Frank Cottrell-Boyce – Acclaimed screenwriter and children’s fiction novelist
• Sally Dynevor MBE – Known for her long-running role as Sally Metcalfe in Coronation Street
• Professor Sam Wass – Leading child psychologist and neuroscientist specializing in child concentration and stress

This special event is part of the wider programme for the International Festival of Neuroscience – the flagship conference of the British Neuroscience Association. It’s also connected to a month-long public programme of interactive neuroscience installations taking place across Liverpool venues, bringing scientific discovery to our community.

All proceeds will be shared equally between the British Neuroscience Association and Queen’s Reading Room as a donation to their charitable activities.

An Evening with Chris Hoy

Sir Chris Hoy is one of Britain’s greatest Olympians. A six-time Olympic gold medallist and 11-time world champion, his career was built on mastering the split-second moments that define victory. Yet last year, he faced another life-changing moment, as he found out he had Stage 4 cancer.

Now, in celebration of his new book All That Matters, hear Chris’ story live as he shares the next phase of his extraordinary life with exceptional bravery. Join him as he reflects on the mindset, resilience and determination that have shaped him on and off the bike – and the lessons that have helped him through sport’s biggest challenges and life’s greatest tests.

Steve Levine

Steve dishes the dirt beneath the gold dust with broadcaster and pop music superfan Katie Puckrik, as they discuss the big hits, bad behaviour, and behind-the-velvet-rope studio moments throughout his career. And when those moments include The Clash, Boy George & Culture Club, The Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder and Motörhead — you know you’re in for a night of Control Room Confessions.

Chris Hadfield: A Journey into the Cos...

Join Colonel Chris Hadfield – acclaimed astronaut, test pilot, spacewalker, spaceship commander, and best-selling author – for a captivating journey into the majesty of our planet and the vast universe beyond. In this visually stunning event, Chris will present never-before-seen space imagery of Earth, the Moon, Mars, and more, in an awe-inspiring exploration of discovery.

Age Guidance: 12+

Guenther Steiner LIVE: Unfiltered

Buckle up and fasten your seatbelts for a hugely entertaining all-areas-access conversation spanning a decade inside Formula 1, with former Haas F1 team principal Guenther Steiner, star of Netflix’s smash hit docuseries Drive to Survive.

Uncompromising, brutally funny and searingly honest, this is Guenther at his very best, telling his story as only he can. Not an event any fan of Formula 1 can afford to miss.

Jonn Elledge Discusses A History of th...

Waterstones Liverpool welcomes Jonn Elledge who joins us to discuss A History of the World in 47 Borders – The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps. Eye-opening and entertaining in equal measure, Elledge’s geo-political history of the world is filled with fascinating narratives about our ever-abiding pre-occupation with drawing lines and upholding ideas of nationhood.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about the scale of human folly.

From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.

John will be in conversation with Neil Atkinson. The discussion wil be followed by an audeince Q&A and then a book signing.

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard and a number of other newspapers. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, spending six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written three books, as well as over a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He lives in London.

Neil Atkinson is a broadcaster and author and is one of the hosts and founding members of The Anfield Wrap.

Before Oasis: In Conversation with Mar...

Before Oasis: In Conversation with Marcus Russell is a rare opportunity to hear the story of how one of the UK’s most successful artist managers came to work with Oasis, the definitive act of Britpop.

Along with the Department of Music’s Dr Mike Jones, a lifelong friend, Russell will reflect on memories of his formative music industry experiences as a young gig promoter in his hometown of Ebbw Vale in South Wales, eventually leading to his management of Jones’s band Latin Quarter, which became a springboard to a 40-year career.

Promoted by the Department of Music, University of Liverpool through the generous support of Mark Astaire, in memory of his brother, Peter Astaire.

Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voi...

Join the Institute of Irish Studies for a talk by Dylan Thomas expert Professor John Goodby (Professor of Arts and Culture, Sheffield Hallam University) and excerpts from Stan Tracey’s Jazz Suite Inspired by Under Milk Wood by pianist Richard Wetherall with narration by Seamus Lavan. The evening will conclude with a wine reception, during which John Goodby will sign copies of his co-authored biography Dylan Thomas (Critical Lives).

‘Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice’: Dylan Thomas and Irish writers

In a review of 1934, the youthful Dylan Thomas claimed: ‘The true future of English poetry, poetry that that can be … read aloud, that comes to life out of the red heart through the brain, lies in the Celtic countries. … Wales [and] Ireland … are building up a poetry that is as serious and genuine as the poetry in Mr Pound’s Active Anthology’.

Like the work of the Irish writers he admired – he thought W. B. Yeats ‘the greatest modern poet’, while James Joyce was the single biggest influence on his style – Thomas exemplifies the way in which writers of the 1920s and 1930s from the so-called margins wrote back to the centre, deploying modernist experiment, linguistic excess, parody, and surrealism to undermine metropolitan pretensions to authority.

Married to Caitlin Macnamara, daughter of Yeats’s friend, the minor poet Francis Macnamara, Thomas also enjoyed many material and familial contact with Ireland, which he visited in 1935 and 1946, while traces of his literary influence and personality can be found in the work of poets as varied as Medbh McGuckian and Patrick Kavanagh, as well as the ‘Belfast Group’ of the 1960s – Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.

This talk will address this little-known web of influence and impact, with a primary focus on Thomas’s debt to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a title he mischievously purloined for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog), Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as well as the Yeatsian models for his early short stories and poems such as ‘In my craft and sullen art’. It will also touch on the apparently stark differences between his famous radio work, Under Milk Wood, and those by Samuel Beckett, such as All That Fall.

John Goodby is Professor of Arts and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University. His research specialisms are Irish writing, Welsh poetry, and British / US poetry, especially modernist poetry, more broadly. He is the leading authority on the work of Dylan Thomas and the author / editor of five books on the subject, including Collected Poems (2014). In this capacity he has worked with and as a consultant to the BBC, the Arts Council, the National Trust, Aardman Films, the OU, the British Library, British Council, etc. He is also a poet and translator of poetry (to date, from Italian, French, and German), with a strong interest in non-anglophone poetries. He has an interest in the visual arts and modern art music, and this is reflected in several collaborations with composers and artists. As an active arts organiser, he has organised poetry festivals, edited poetry anthologies and magazines, run a poetry press, and curated and presented poetry reading series.

Richard Wetherall has been working as a pianist for 25 years in which time he has played with jazz musicians Richard Iles, Bobby Wellins and Mark Nightingale. He has toured worldwide with Casablanca Steps and Dominic Halpin and the Honey B’s including supporting Tony Bennett and his quartet in Halifax, Canada. He has taught in various institutions including LIPA, Manchester University and Chetham’s Piano Summer School. He accompanies two Music Place choirs as well as the Vibrant Voices Choir (for people living with dementia).

Seamus Lavan is an actor and theatre-maker. He graduated from Oxford University in 2017, where he studied English. He then trained for two years at the Ecole internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
He has performed on both screen and stage in projects that include short films, fashion campaigns, music videos, and an outdoor production of Henry V in Florence scored by a full, live orchestra.

After graduating from Lecoq, he started a theatre company called BRILLIG with some of his classmates. They recently finished devising their first show, Terry’s – a cabaret set in a 1990s US car dealership. They will take this to the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringes later this year, before doing a national tour.

He is also developing a solo piece based on Julius Caesar’s long-lost TED talk on leadership mindset. This should be finished in the autumn.