Event type: Talk

Know Your History? WoW Archive Project Launch

Writing on the Wall is excited to announce a special event to launch our year-long programme of activity cataloguing, sharing and creatively interpreting WoW’s archive.

The title Know Your History? is intended as a provocation – how can we recognise and remember the struggles and achievements of the diverse communities that have shaped Liverpool? What role do archives, literature and storytelling play in ensuring that these histories are not lost?

We will be joined by Gary Younge, an award-winning author, broadcaster and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian, he has written seven books, most recently Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (Faber, 2025). He will reflect on his work with Writing on the Wall over the past 25 years, considering how WoW’s history can shine a light on changes in our broader social and political landscape and why it remains so important to understand and document these histories.

We’ll also have performances from artists in WoW’s creative community and an exhibition of items from our archive.

If you’ve been a part of WoW’s history over the past 25 years, or are passionate about archiving and local history, we would love you to join us – come and see archive materials on display and share your knowledge of WoW to help uncover, preserve and celebrate the often-overlooked heritage of Liverpool’s diverse communities.

Following on from the launch event there will be several opportunities to engage in the creation and celebration of WoW’s archive, including a free education and training programme, archival volunteering, and creative commissions. An expression of interest form for these activities can be found here.

If you’d like to attend our launch event, please book your place hereMonday 16th November, 7:30pm-9:00pmToxteth Library, Windsor Street, L8 1XF

Following on from the launch event there will be several opportunities to engage in the creation and celebration of WoW’s archive, including a free education and training programme, archival volunteering, and creative commissions. If you’d like to get involved in the project in the coming months, you can register your interest here.

About Gary Younge:

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian, he has written seven books, most recently Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (Faber, 2025). Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism and the 2025 Robert. B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ and New Statesman, among others, and made radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit.

His fifth book, Another Day in the Death of America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund

Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. 25 Years of of Creating Change Through the Power of the Word is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Paul Birtill: Blissful Oblivion – Book Launch

Writing on the Wall is delighted to announce a special night to launch Liverpool-born poet Paul Birtill’s superb new collection, Blissful Oblivion: Poems 2022–2026, published by Writing on the Wall. 

Described by John Cooper Clarke as a poet who “makes me laugh and feel depressed at the same time and that’s a rare gift”, Birtill has built a distinctive body of work from the darker, stranger and frequently ridiculous sides of everyday life. 

Blissful Oblivion finds him in unmistakable form. Ageing, mortality, family, childhood, sex, religion, memory, loneliness and the sheer inconvenience of being alive all come under his uncompromising gaze. The result is poetry that can move in a few lines from bleakness to laugh-out-loud comedy – and sometimes manage both at once. 

At the launch, Paul will read from Blissful Oblivion as well as from earlier collections and will join us in conversation about this new collection, his Liverpool beginnings and his life in poetry. 

Born in Walton, Liverpool in 1960 and now living in London, Paul Birtill has published numerous poetry collections with Hearing Eye and Wrecking Ball Press, including New and Selected Poems. His plays have also been staged at London theatres, including Squalor, which was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award.  

Direct, funny, uncomfortable and sharply observant, Birtill’s poetry has little interest in pretending that life makes more sense than it does. As he writes elsewhere in the collection, poetry became a means of “translating pain into words” – an approach that lies at the heart of this funny, melancholic and unmistakably human collection.  

Tickets:£5 – Event only£15 – Event plus a copy of Blissful Oblivion 

Black Convicts: How Slavery Shaped Australia

On Monday 19 October at 6pm, the historian Santilla Chingaipe will give a public talk at the Adelphi Hotel, a joint event with LJMU’s Research Institute for Literature and Cultural History (RILCH) and the Smithdown Litfest. Santilla will discuss her groundbreaking findings and her new book, Black Convicts.’

Santilla is a Zambian-born filmmaker, historian and author whose work excavates the stories Australia has long chosen to forget. Black Convicts, was shortlisted for Australia’s Stella Prize and longlisted for the prestigious Cundill History Prize, cementing her place among Australia’s most important historians. 

To register for Santilla’s event at the Adelphi please go to this Eventbrite site:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-convicts-how-slavery-shaped-australia-tickets-2002064776641

LCR Data Community – What a waste!

The Liverpool City Region Data Community meets monthly to share expertise across sectors to help us all understand and use data better.

Did you know that waste crime costs the English economy £1bn a year? That’s one reason this month’s event is diving into one of the UK’s most important and overlooked industries, waste. 

We’ll hear from two speakers who’ll share why and how accessing good data about waste is such a sticky problem. Our first speaker Sophie Walker, CEO and co-founder of Southport-based Dsposal. Our second speaker Tim Hobbs, CEO of Bartec Municipal Technologies, who works with a number of our local authorities to understand more about what we all throw away.

 

ESEA Constellations: A Roundtable

This afternoon of talks, performance and conversation, convened by writer and curator Jessica Wan Ka Po, gathers artists, writers and thinkers to explore how East and Southeast Asian voices are shaping British art history and its futures.

As ESEA artists’ work reaches wider audiences, how might the collaborations, networks and archives that sustain their practices reshape our understanding of both past and future?

Annie Jael Kwan, Jennifer Lee Tsai, Sufea Mohamad Noor, Emily Beswick, Hester Yang and others reflect on diaspora, collective memory and community-building through the lens of Liverpool’s historic Chinese and ESEA communities.

Free, booking required

 

Thomas Glave & Stephen Small: In Conversation

 

Thomas Glave and Stephen Small join Dr Amal Abu-Bakare, Lecturer in the Politics of Race and Decolonial Studies at the University of Liverpool.

Thomas Glave is a Professor in the English Department at Binghamton University, State University of New York, author of five books and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. A two-time Fulbright Scholar and honorary visiting professor at the University of Liverpool, he serves on the editorial board of Wasafiri and is a trustee of Writing West Midlands and Peepal Tree Press. His latest essay collection, published by Jacaranda Books, will be out in the autumn.

Liverpool 8 born, Stephen Small is a Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He researches the history and sociology of Black people across the diaspora and his most recent book Black Liverpool: ‘the real thing’. West African, West Indian and Afro-American culture at the end of the twentieth century was published by Liverpool University Press.

Click here to book tickets

Recapture Book Launch

Recapture is a yearlong publishing mentorship that takes budding writers with previous drug and alcohol dependency or mental health issues through the process of becoming a self-published writer. Within the year we have worked with industry professionals, created community workshops and submitted artist grants in the build-up to a public release and launch of full collections of writing: “Black, White and Rainbow Chaos” by Chloe Jones  “Little Life Musings” by N.S G  “What ye Doin Today?” by Jaimie Cannon  “1095” by Simon Taylor  These books will go on sale from the Tuesday 24th November , with all proceeds going towards the writers themselves to continue their craft. The first sale will be at the book launch happening at Make: Hamilton on Tuesday 24th November, 1-4pm. This day will also have exhibitions from the illustrators, guest music and poetry performances, talks around how to start your writing journey and how to network within the creative writing world, no matter your background or literacy level.  This an abstinent celebration of the recovery community of Wirral and is welcome to all!   Tickets are free and can be booked through this link, Recapture: Book launch Tickets, Tuesday, November 24  •  1 PM – 4 PM | Eventbrite If you are unable to or have issues with Eventbrite, you can email hannah.weiner@spiderproject.org.uk or call 0151 647 7723    Our first cohort are ready to read extracts from there new publications at this community launch event, and would love to invite yourself, or anyone who you may know that would enjoy this event. If you have any questions, please email hannah.weiner@spiderproject.org.uk or call 0151 647 7723 

The Folklore of Halloween

The Folklore of Halloween, a talk by Margaret Holbrook

This talk looks at the history of Halloween and how it ties in with our modern celebrations. Whether that be spooky and an evening for ghosts and ghost stories, to mischief making and finding out who or when you would marry. The Victorians, in the main, found a lot of fun with the latter. Trick or treating is an Americanism that is pretty much settled now with us, but in time, something new might come along and overtake that. The feasts between the end of October and into early November (excepting Bonfire Night) are very similar although don’t get a mention much now. And there are also the religious festivals in the days around Halloween – All Hallows, All Saints, All Souls.

Artist Talk with Becky Beasley

Hear from award-winning artist Becky Beasley as she discusses her practice and her touring exhibition A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029).

Beasley is a visual artist, mentor, educator & autism advocate and works across sculpture, photography and writing. She is Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London.

Her practice broadly explores objects and spaces of the everyday, and how we might inhabit them. It is concerned with spatial experience, and particularly the interior. She has developed a practice which explores image and the limits of language; referencing both personal experiences and literary references to capture moments of complexity and ambiguity – some of which are intertwined with her autism diagnosis and human experience in this world.

Free, booking required. Donations welcome

The Umbrella Man and other stories

Fresh from a successful run at the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe, Martin Fitzgerald is now taking his one-man storytelling show on tour.  

The show is based on Fitzgerald’s critically acclaimed book of the same name, published by Biteback in April 2026. It was a Radio 4 Pick of the Week and Richard Herring has described it as his favourite book of the year.  

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories brings a fresh perspective to one of the most enduring subjects of modern history – the JFK Assassination. Rather than getting bogged down by the usual questions of who and why, Fitzgerald instead chooses to focus on the ordinary people who were caught up in the most scrutinised six seconds of the twentieth century.  

A man who opened an umbrella on a sunny day. A dressmaker with vertigo. A woman with a polaroid. The mysterious Babushka Lady. And the three suspicious tramps, arrested shortly after the assassination.  

These are the strange, true stories of a small group of accidental bystanders to history, who spent the rest of their lives trying to escape it. The Umbrella Man and Other Stories carefully guides the audience through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, taking them back to 1963 and into the shoes of the people who were present that day.  

 Combining humour, meticulous research and impeccable storytelling, this gripping show shines a new light on the event – whether it’s your specialist subject or you’re a complete novice.

 

REVIEWS 

“Fitzgerald’s approach is full of humanity.” – Hugh Bonneville, Actor – Paddington and Downton Abbey. 

“Smart and restrained.” – Al Murray, Comedian and co-host of We Have Ways of Making You Talk. 

“Fascinating.” – Robin Ince, Comedian and Broadcaster 

“One of the best things I saw in Edinburgh and taught fascinating things about an event I thought I knew a lot about.” – Sarfraz Manzoor, Writer and broadcaster.  

“***** – a gripping, intelligent, and deeply human exploration of one of history’s most infamous moments” – Counter Culture 

“***** – witty, fast, and packed with detail” – Scottish Field  

“Fitzgerald is a master in the art of storytelling. Highly recommended.” – Fringe Review

 

ABOUT MARTIN FITZGERALD 

Martin Fitzgerald is an author and screenwriter from London. His first book, Ruth and Martin’s Album Club (2017), was a collection of reviews of classic albums written by celebrities upon hearing them for the first time. It featured contributions from Richard Osman, Ian Rankin, Bonnie Greer and many more. 

Martin’s particular interest is taking well-worn stories, approaching them from a new angle and finding the comedy and absurdity within them. 

 

Content Advisories

Age recommendation 14+

Under 16s must be accompanied by adult

Contains themes of murder and racism