Interest area: Literature

When is a Nazi salute not a Nazi salute? When performed – twice – by Elon Musk, Trump’s loyal Mitläufer (hanger-on). Orwellian dystopia unfolds: protesters jailed, activists punished, and the BBC bowing to right-wing pressure – all just in the UK. In the US, Green Card holders are detained for lawful protest, scientists deported over critical phone comments, and Venezuelans falsely branded as criminals. Meanwhile, Trump flirts with Putin, excusing an invasion his own supporters recently condemned.

And then there’s Gaza. ‘Never again,’ we said, but only one side meant it. As the Israeli State commits genocide in broad daylight, democratic leaders barely raise a whisper in protest.

Yet, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’ WoWFEST’s panel, featuring Chris Nineham, Niheer Dasandi, and Roger Hill, discusses democracy under attack—and how we can fight back.

More guests to be announced!

Chris Nineham is a founder and vice-chair of the Stop the War Coalition. Arrested in 2025 during a pro-Palestinian march, he pleaded not guilty to Public Order Act charges. He helped organise the historic 2003 anti-war protests, the 2001 Genoa G8 protests, and the European and World Social Forums. A regular media commentator, he writes for Stop the War, Counterfire, and others.

Niheer Dasandi, author of Is Democracy Failing (2018), is Professor of Global Politics and Sustainable Development. His research focuses on human rights, development, climate change, and foreign policy. He co-chairs the Lancet Countdown’s Public and Political Engagement Working Group. Niheer’s has published a range of books, and his work appears in leading journals.

Roger Hill hosted the UK’s longest-running alternative music show on BBC Radio Merseyside for nearly 40 years. A key figure in Youth Theatre, he has worked at Liverpool Everyman and beyond, now focusing on Live Art and storytelling.

Dive into the raw, untamed heart of storytelling with ‘Wild Writing,’ a festival exploration of memoir, fiction, and the spaces in between. Join Jeff Young, navigating the hallucinatory landscapes of memory in Wild Twin; Jake Morris-Campbell, charting a poetic pilgrimage through Northumbria in Between the Salt and the Ash; and Tony Wailey, evoking the maritime rhythms of Liverpool’s past in his series The Diary of the Smyth-Wailey’s.

Discover how these writers push the boundaries of form, blending fact and feeling to forge new, powerful ways of telling our stories. From personal journeys to regional odysseys, experience the wild, transformative power of words.

Jeff Young is a Liverpool-based writer for screen, stage, and radio. A former Creative Writing lecturer, he is the author of Ghost Town (Costa Prize-shortlisted) and Wild Twin, a dreamlike memoir of travel, memory, and loss.

Tony Wailey is a Liverpool-born writer and former seaman. His work explores . His work, including his forthcoming book, Rhythms That Carry, maritime history and identity, with a focus on Liverpool’s seafaring past entwined with the personal stories of those who lived it.

Jake Morris-Campbell is a poet and BBC New Generation Thinker from South Shields. In Between the Salt and the Ash (March 2025), he embarks on a pilgrimage across Northumbria, exploring history, identity, and cultural change.

2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end Second World War. Gary Younge, renowned journalist, author and broadcaster, returns to WoWFEST to highlight how, following the war, despite the huge role that they played in WW11, black people have been written out of the story.

The 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris offers an opportunity to explore the discrepancy between race-based mythologies around Black involvement in the Second World War. Revisiting a photographed moment from near the end of the second world war, ‘through the eyes of the colonised’, Younge will ‘explore a range of mythologies about who fought and what they were fighting for’. and what that tells us about Europe as a whole and how Black people’s presence here is misunderstood. He will also ‘unpick what that tells us about Europe as a whole and how black people’s presence here is misunderstood today’.

Gary asks how  conversations about responsibility, patriotism, immigration, integration, equality, and justice would be understood if the contribution of black people was written back in rather than written out, and their role fully acknowledged?

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly a columnist at The Guardian, he has written six books, most recently Dispatches From the Diaspora. 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 The 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.

In partnership with: Libraries, Museums and Galleries University of Liverpool.

A poetic exploration of Oglet Shore, a fragile green edgeland clinging to the Mersey that is being threatened by local industry.
Liverpool Dead Good Poets Society are hosting a poetic exploration of the fragile green edgeland clinging to the Mersey and threatened by the expansion of local industry and Liverpool Airport.

Featuring the work of DGPS and other local poets, with a focus on the beauty of the shore as it is now, looking at the threats to its future from commercial development and climate change, and celebrating the community activities designed to conserve ‘Liverpool’s last survivng wilderness.’

‘The Oglet moon on winter nights
alights on backs of otters
while egrets sleep an d bats skim low
across the silver waters.’
-Greg Quiery

In association with Save Oglet Shore (SOS) and Writing on the Wall (WoW).

All post-expense proceeds go to Save Oglet Shore.

In 1984, John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was appointed to investigate a series of killings in Northern Ireland by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, where it was alleged that a secret shoot-to-kill policy was in operation.

Shortly after making demands for intelligence files belonging to the RUC and MI5, he was removed from post. In his subsequent memoir published in 1987, Stalker went on to expose a conspiracy behind his sacking that would see additional mystery surround the events that he had set out to investigate.

Two years later, another killing raised further allegations of the British state’s involvement in murder. On 12 February 1989, the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association shot dead the Belfast solicitor Patrick Finucane in front of his family, including his young son John. Subsequent inquiries by John Stevens, Chief Constable of Northumbria Police, got close to the truth, despite shadowy forces attempting to burn down his incident room. In 2012, Prime Minister David Cameron was forced to apologise to both Patrick Finucane’s family and Parliament for the ‘shocking levels of collusion’ where state agents played key roles in the solicitor’s murder. More recently, the Labour government has announced that they will, finally, set up a Public Inquiry into the case.

This event sees John Finucane MP, in conversation with Prof Paddy Hillyard of Queens University, Belfast to discuss the impact of MI5’s secret intelligence-led counter-insurgency strategy in the context of both the Stalker investigation and the killing of John’s father Patrick.

Paddy Hillyard is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Queens University, Belfast and author of Decades of Deceit: The Stalker Affair and its Legacy.

John Finucane is a solicitor, a former Lord Mayor and since 2017, the MP for Belfast North. John is a long-term campaigner for a public inquiry into the killing of his father.

Brian Bilston and Henry Normal appear together for the first time in a show which one critic has described as “two people reading some poems.”

Along the way, they will be drawing on their vast catalogue of crowd favourites – and throwing in new poems to prevent becoming their own tribute bands.

Not ones to overpromise, Brian and Henry are prepared to commit to delivering the greatest poetry show in the history of the world, or their names aren’t Brian Bilston and Henry Normal. An evening of poems to be enjoyed, not endured.

Brian Bilston has been described as the Banksy of poetry and Twitter’s unofficial Poet Laureate; with over 400,000 followers on social media, Brian has become truly beloved by the online community. He has published several collections of poetry, including You Took the Last Bus Home and Alexa, What Is There to Know About Love?, described by one reviewer as ‘the funniest collection of humorous verse I have seen in a long time’. His novel Diary of a Somebody was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. He has also written poetry for children, including a collection of football poems, 50 Ways to Score a Goal, while his acclaimed poem Refugees was set to music by composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and turned into a picture book.

Henry is a writer, poet, TV and film producer, founder of the Manchester Poetry Festival (now the Literature Festival), and co-founder of the Nottingham Poetry Festival. In June 2017, he was honoured with a special BAFTA for services to television. He co-wrote and script-edited the multi-award-winning Mrs Merton Show and the spin-off series Mrs Merton and Malcolm. Setting up Baby Cow Productions Ltd in 1990, Henry executive produced all and script-edited many of the shows during its 17-and-a-half-year output. Highlights of the Baby Cow output during his time include the Oscar-nominated film Philomena, I Believe in Miracles, Gavin and Stacey, Moone Boy, Uncle, Marion and Geof, Nighty Night, The Mighty Boosh, Red Dwarf, Hunderby, Camping, and Alan Partridge.

Presented with the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.

Not only is Kit de Waal an incredibly talented writer and storyteller, she is also a champion for elevating the voices and opportunities for diverse, working class writers, putting her money where her mouth is by creating the Kit de Waal Creative Writing Scholarship to help improve working-class representation in the arts.

It’s a pleasure to welcome her back to WoWFEST for this online event discussing her latest novel, The Best of Everything, described by Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo as ‘A profoundly compassionate novel of devastating power’. The Best of Everything follows Paulette’s planning for her future perfect wedding, honeymoon, perfect life. But life has other plans for her. Denton disappears without a goodbye, his friend Garfield steps in—and soon, there’s a baby, and Paulette finds purpose raising her son. But it isn’t enough, and Paulette finds can’t she stop thinking about Nellie, a little boy growing up nearby with no mother in sight? A moving tale of unexpected love and the ties that pull us in, no matter our plans. Pull up a chair and get your hankies ready.

British/Irish writer Kit de Waal is the author of multiple novels. My Name Is Leon was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and was adapted for BBC2; The Trick to Time was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; her acclaimed biography Without Warning and Only Sometimes was Radio 4 Book of the Week, and shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. She has written extensively about the need for the publishing industry to be more inclusive, was editor of Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. and presented the BBC Radio 4 programme Where Are All the Working Class Writers?

Beyond Black America: Insights from Brazilian History is the focus of this compelling online talk by friend of WoW Professor Stephen Small, urging us to look beyond familiar narratives of the Black experience. While Black America has profoundly shaped global Black identity, the Black experience across the Americas is far more diverse.

Join us for this insightful online talk as Professor Small explores the rich and often overlooked history of Black Brazilians, relevant to Liverpool. He will illuminate key differences: Brazil has twice the Black population of the US, primarily Portuguese-speaking, with a slavery history beginning centuries earlier and tragically involving ten times more enslaved Africans. Brazil was the last independent nation in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888.

Crucially, the talk will highlight the remarkable resistance of enslaved people in Brazil, where larger, sustained rebellions led to extensive Maroon communities – a vital, often overlooked history. As a Guest Curator at Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum, Professor Small will also touch upon Liverpool’s historical trade and political relations with Brazil.

Professor Stephen Small taught at the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995-2024. He is Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues since 2020. Born in Toxteth, he earned his PhD in Sociology at the Unversity of California, Berkeley in 1989 and has held visiting positions at universities in the UK, Netherlands, France, Spain, Brazil, Japan and Zimbabwe.