Review by Anupriya Sisodia of "The Life and Times of Agatha Christie" at Literary Leicester Festival 2026

I wasn’t entirely sure what I was walking into when I signed up for Literary Leicester 2026. It was my first ever literary festival, but I knew it would be something I’d remember.  

Wednesday 18th March began with "The Life and Times of Agatha Christie" in the Attenborough Arts Centre. I remember noticing how carefully I was taking everything in. Even before it started, the room already had its own atmosphere. It was full in that warm, expectant way: people gathering in clusters, coats coming off, festival pamphlets being flicked through, that quiet pre-event energy where everyone is just waiting for it to begin. And I even saw someone dressed as Hercule Poirot, moustache and all, which made me smile before I could even stop myself. Poirot, one of my earliest literary fascinations, was the kind of character I grew up thinking of as untouchable in his brilliance, so seeing him casually walking through a modern arts centre struck me as surreal in the best way.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Agatha Christie. I started reading her books when I was around twelve or thirteen. I didn’t realize then how long they would stay with me, quietly threading themselves into how I understand narrative, suspense, and character, or that I’d end up in a different country years later, listening to someone unpack her life in front of an audience. 

Dr Mark Aldridge led the talk. The way he spoke about Christie felt grounded and engaging rather than distant or overly academic. He walked us through her life as if her story still pulsed with warmth and movement. I realized I was listening more than writing; my notes turned into scattered fragments. When I listen, my attention naturally shifts to thought, and my imagination crafts its own scenes alongside what I’m hearing.

At one point, he mentioned The Mousetrap and its extraordinarily long-running history since 1952. Immediately, my mind connected it to home: I thought of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, a popular Bollywood film that has been showing for decades at Maratha Mandir in Mumbai, India. Two very different stories, two very different worlds, yet both enduring, because people keep returning to them, generation after generation. It seemed like one of those cultural overlaps your mind makes without asking permission, where distance doesn’t matter as much as shared longevity, shared affection. I didn’t say any of it out loud, obviously. I just let the thought sit there for a moment, like a small bridge between places I carry in me.

The Q&A session carried a particular sense of meaning. People were asking questions with such care, such curiosity, as if they weren’t just seeking answers but trying to understand the texture of Christie’s legacy from different angles: her narrative arc, structure, the psychology behind her characters. There was something very communal about it, not performative, but shared. Like everyone in the room was gently adding to the same unfolding conversation.

By the time the session ended, I felt something subtle settle in. Christie’s work lives on not just because people read it, but because it is constantly re-entered and re-imagined. Each reader brings something new to it, and in doing so, keeps it moving forward. I left carrying that thought: stories don’t belong only to the past or the page. They find new rooms, over and over, just like this one.

About the reviewer
Anupriya Sisodia is a published romance fiction author, pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She is an avid reader who loves writing stories with realistic, relatable characters who experience emotional and exciting journeys on their way to a happy ending.

Review by Beth Gaylard of "Creative Writing Student Showcase" at Literary Leicester Festival, 2022

 

I attended lots of events that ran as part of the recent Literary Leicester Festival, but one of the most memorable for me was the showcase for Creative Writing students. Usually, as students listening to each others’ work, we are in a forum where commentary and critique are required. It’s quite rare to get a chance to listen and absorb peers’ work, without that requirement. For recently enrolled MA, PhD and BA students, working on our research through the pandemic, there hasn’t been the opportunity for any networking offline for ages, so there was a bit of a ‘school’s out’ atmosphere.

Ten writers, poets, storytellers and novelists chose extracts or short works not necessarily connected with their current projects and read them aloud to an audience of peers and their guests. Some were published, some not. The main objective was to choose something you liked that you’d written yourself, and read it aloud to a roomful of near strangers. While some readers confessed to feeling nervous, the event wasn’t billed as a performance, and most if not all of us read off the page. There was a feeling that it was a positive opportunity. Hopefully the listeners enjoyed it as much as the readers; they seemed to, judging by the applause and the buzz of conversation afterwards.

There is a simple pleasure in sharing work with an attentive, mutually supportive audience, and this is enhanced in the experience of hearing your own words aloud. You get that ‘leap off the page,’ that is so empowering when you’ve spent a lot of working time in a quiet place, on your own, perhaps feeling quite unsure that what you’ve done has any potential, let alone any significance.  

So … Please can we do it again!

About the reviewer

Beth Gaylard is a writer and PhD Creative Writing student at Leicester University. Published works include Firebrands, an SF novel and various poems. Her work in progress is a piece of rural dystopia. Her home is in Leicestershire.

You can read more about the Creative Writing Student Showcase 2022 on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Lee Wright of Howard Jacobson at Literary Leicester Festival

The return of Literary Leicester offered an exciting line-up of well-known authors, but, for me, none more so than Howard Jacobson.  

To date, he has published sixteen novels, been nominated for the Booker Prize on no less than four occasions, twice making the short-list, and winning the prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question. Howard has twice won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for his novels The Mighty Walzer and Zoo Time; and his 2014 novel, J was also short-listed for the Goldsmiths Prize. Along the way, Jacobson has also published six works of non-fiction, his latest being Mother’s Boy, the memoir that he was in Leicester to talk about.

This latest book is something of a departure for him. Talking on the night to Professor and author David Brauner, Jacobson told those in attendance that the origin of his memoir was a collection of reminisces of bad things that he had done throughout his life -  to have, as Jacobson said, “An honest conversation with myself, a moral accounting.” 

Mother’s Boy: A Writer’s Beginnings is, among many things, a water-damaged love letter to both his parents and the early literary influences of F. R. Leavis, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence; influences that both inspired and haunted him for a long time. Indeed, though harbouring ambitions to become a novelist from a young age, Jacobson was forty-years-old before his first novel, Coming from Behind, was published in 1983. His new memoir is a fascinating re-telling of the upbringing and circumstances that led to his breakthrough. 

On the night, Jacobson talked of the many reasons for not writing. His own name, Jacobson was just one - the reason being that he could not envisage his name down the spine of a book, sitting on a shelf alongside those of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As he told David, “I was a ridiculous mess of self-doubt.”  

Though it is a memoir for all, it is an especially poignant one for writers. By Jacobson’s own admission, he spent a large part of his youth not knowing who he was. And if anyone is questioning the reasons to write fiction in the first place, to find out who you are is surely as good an answer as any. It was only by writing as Howard Jacobson, and not as George Eliot or D. H. Lawrence, that he finally became the thing that had long eluded him: a novelist.                 

  

About the reviewer
Lee Wright is currently writing a novel as part of a PhD at the University of Leicester, where he also studied on the MA in Creative Writing. His short stories and poetry have been published with Burning House Press, Fairlight Books and epoque press.   

Review by Tionee Joseph of Two Events at Literary Leicester 2021

Literary Leicester took place from 17th March to the 19th March 2021 and was hosted online by Dr Harry Whitehead at the University of Leicester.

Marlon James in conversation with Dr Michael Bucknor streamed simultaneously from Leicester, New York and Jamaica. The author was the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings. He stated the importance of reading in his childhood and how it can make one a better writer. He also reflected on how the lockdown has affected his writing practice, saying that he used it as an escape from reality.

When asked about the relevance of the literary canon, he said that it is important that it is actively and continually interrogated. In the genre of magical realism in which he writes, James says that there is room to explore queer perspectives. 

Jeffrey Boakye in conversation with Dr Emma Parker

The University of Leicester graduate, author and teacher Jeffrey Boakye spoke about race in Britain within the context of grime music. He said that for young, marginalised people, grime music is a way to experience joy, creativity and their heritage. He also emphasized the role of the media in perpetuating negative stereotypes about black people and how this is a narrative spawned from colonialism. Boakye said that for change to happen, we need to challenge oppressive ideologies and he encourages young people to prepare to have these conversations. 

The talks that I attended were very thought-provoking and I learnt a lot about the craft of writing. The conversations were relevant to current issues and I thoroughly enjoyed watching both events. This was a brilliant programme of diverse figures and I hope for more of the same in future festivals.

About the reviewer
Tionee Joseph is completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. She has a blog where she writes about writing and gives lifestyle advice, which you can read here. Her poetry and articles on film, TV and adaptations have been published.

Review by Rosalind Adam of Poetry Reading by Douglas Dunn and Rory Waterman at Literary Leicester

Poetry Reading by Douglas Dunn and Rory Waterman, hosted by Nick Everett, at Literary Leicester Festival, 2017

We descended metal and glass into the heart of Fielding Johnson’s South Wing. This, we knew, was going to be good. In the midst of yet another frenetically successful Literary Leicester week, we were about to be treated to an hour of poetry, an hour of pure pleasure, and we weren’t disappointed.

Rory Waterman is no stranger to Leicester University having studied for his BA and PhD here. His warm, self-deprecating humour had us all smiling along as he regaled the horrors of life in the staff room, the agonies of teenage years and travels through cities remembered, reading from his latest collection, Sarajevo Roses, and his earlier collection, Tonight the Summer’s Over.

Douglas Dunn, we were told, had travelled down on the 5.30 am train from Scotland to introduce us to The Noise of a Fly, his first poetry collection in sixteen years. The book blurb promises a collection ‘brimming with warmth, mischief and humour’ which is absolutely correct. Dunn has not been labelled ‘the most respected Scottish poet of his generation’ for nothing. He treated us to his own style of self-deprecating humour which the first line of his poem 'Thursday' well illustrates: ‘Gave yet another lecture. God, I’m boring.’

His gentle delivery belied some gritty content. 'The Nothing-But' contains lines that speak of emotions few people have ever committed to words: 'To have kissed the lips of one who is dying / Is to have tasted silence, salt and wilderness.’

Of all the funny, fascinating and moving lines we heard that evening, if I had to choose a favourite, it would be Douglas Dunn’s line about a poem trapped in an empty fountain pen, because we all have poems like that … or is it just me? 

About the reviewer
Rosalind Adam is a writer and student on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. Her blog is: http://rosalindadam.blogspot.co.uk/