Review by David Keyworth of "Beyond the Page: Mary Shelley 175 Years On," with Andrew McInnes, Bradford Literature Festival, 6 July 2026

"There’s more to Mary Shelley than Frankenstein": this was how Dr Andrew McInnes concluded his talk at Bradford’s Festival Hub. He divided his slides into four main themes: Goth Queen; Mother of Science Fiction; Queer Ally; Contemporary.

He cited a range of evidence to suggest how Mary (1797-1851) was a Goth before Goths were invented. One rumour is that she and her poetic-genius partner, Percy Bysshe Shelley, made love on the grave of Mary’s equally famous mother, feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft. McInnes argued that, though this may be true, the term "make love" in the eighteenth century did not necessarily mean to f***.

The Mother of Science Fiction section mainly drew on the novel The Last Man (1826). Mary imagined a fast-travelling world, where London to Edinburgh would take two hours in a hot air balloon. It is a small mercy that she never lived to see the reality of modern train travel.

McInnes backed up his description of his subject as a queer ally mainly with reference to her helping Isabella Robinson and the transgressive Walter Sholto Douglas, in 1827, acquire fake passports and live lives of superficial conformity, in Europe.

Mary’s attitude to the east and the Muslim world was, McInnes acknowledged, one that didn’t necessarily paint her in such a liberal light. He referred to the way that the non-Christian world was often the original source of strife in her fiction, for example the plague in The Last Man. Even the most forward-thinking individuals still absorb the attitudes of their era.

Audience questions covered topics including Mary’s world view, how the Shelleys financed their lifestyle, Lord Byron and Orientalism, and finally, a view of American sitcom, The Munsters, as an alternative 1960s existence for Frankenstein’s Monster.

McInnes is Reader in English Literature at Edge Hill University. He certainly did justice to his subject and her difficult but "creatively engaging life."

 

About the reviewer
David Keyworth was born in West Bromwich but grew up in North Lincolnshire. He was awarded a New Poets Bursary by the Northern Writers’ Awards, 2013. His debut pamphlet, The Twilight Shift, is published by Wild Pressed. He has completed a poem-sequence called Death and Taxis, which he’d like to include in another pamphlet. He also writes for the Weekend Notes.  

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 of Sheaf Poetry Festival (4) by Jon Wilkins

What a wonderful way to spend a weekend, indulging in the impressive poets featured in the Sheaf Poetry Festival held on YouTube and accessible to all via Zoom, Twitter @SheafPoetryFest, and on www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival. The performances from all poets will be available on YouTube. Search Sheaf Poetry.

Having earlier attended their Ecopoetry and Found Poetry workshop, I ended my Sheaf Poetry Festival experience by listening to a performance of poetry about climate change with Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin. I was not disappointed. Using many of the techniques described in their workshops they proceeded to eviscerate climate change deniers with their powerful words and performances. Words can deliver change. The right words that is. Poetry can make a difference in raising awareness of matters of vital importance and we see this here.

Caleb Parkin read from work looking at gendered aspects of ecology. He talked about writing as if in drag. Taking on another persona to get your message across. And what a message.

Caleb thinks that who we have in charge is important in climate change. He read from poems welcoming change. 

Caleb felt that using schlocky pop culture in your writing means you can have fun writing your own works with ecological themes.

Inspired by Dylan Thomas he was able to combine the memory of Thomas and his work for a petrochemical giant. ‘By the Writing shed at Laugharne’:

          unliving water
          Neither fresh nor salty nor brackish
          Water which once had fierce appetites
          Now shredding like cellophane
          Popped like a dot of bubble wrap …

... giving us the sense of pollution of the ocean as we allow it to be damaged beyond repair. Simple writing, full of the horror of pollution and climate damage.

Carrie Etter read from her collection The Weather in Normal about her hometown in Illinois. She divided the book into three arcs about the loss of where she comes from. This started with the death of her parents, then the sale of the family house, and then the effect of climate change in Illinois. Throughout the collection, she shows a widening arc of loss. Not just her family, but the environment she loved and the loss of the ecology she had known. She is angry. She is disappointed. She is not sure if we can overcome the problems, but in her writing, she highlights them and brings the issue to new audiences. 

She performed a ten-minute prose poem from the collection and the images are etched in my mind. She is well worth a read and her readings tonight ended on a hopeful note as she described happy memories of her hometown. Beautifully written:

          … A song in the body
          The body in Illinois.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (3) by Jon Wilkins

It was a real pleasure to listen to the work of three poets; Tom Sastry, Phoebe Stuckes & Will Harris at the Sheaf Poetry Festival via Facebook.

Tom Sastry told us that reading his work was a pleasure for him. It was also a pleasure for us as he read a section from ‘a man’s house catches fire.’ He told us that 'the fire in the book is the worst thing in the world happening without being named …' He wrote about experiences that are unmentionable. His house is a furnace but he didn’t get burnt. We heard him tell us that suffering is isolation as he spoke about Covid. He had an interesting look at the situation in his poem 'Screening interview Bristol 2032' where he was asked 'Did you think it was enough to be kind?' and we have to ask ourselves: was it? 'The fire still raging and me not dead' perhaps sums up his outlook on life. A poignant look at contemporary Britain.

Phoebe Stuckes read some beautiful poems from her latest book Platinum Blonde as well as others from her catalogue. She conveys a cruel version of her life as in the poem which included the line 'My life is the joke and everyone is pointing.' Her narrator does not play the victim, she is too strong for that, but she does lay herself open to disappointment in relationships which she describes openly. The to and fro in her life is documented cleverly. In ‘Bad Girls Club’ she reminisces:

           How could you really know yourself
           If you’ve never had that fake hair extension
           Ripped from the back of your head.

So much is going on in those three lines about life and the social bubble she lived in. The sadness of love and loss is exemplified by the lines:

           Is it too late to tell you this is what love looks like
           Holding her name like a cough sweet …

It's a strange allusion but one we understand as the numbness pervades her mouth then heart.

In ‘Paris’ she tells us: 'All I think about is love and money, marrying for money and falling in love…' Then: 'I don’t want that kind of love or money. I want to be stinking drunk in a restaurant.' She knows what she wants and is tough enough to get it despite the tender nature of much of her work.

Finally Will Harris read some of his work. He found it strange reading to his computer. In ‘My Name is Dai’ we see a man disintegrating after the death of his wife:

          Try a little tenderness, mmm nuh uh uh. That was when Susie saw
          the haze descend. Like an explosion in a quarry the inward collapse
          rippled out across his face, throwing clouds of dust into the sky.
          I’m sorry. A man shouldn’t cry. I haven’t cried since I was a boy.
          I haven’t ...

He read from ‘The white jumper’:

          We were sitting upstairs and in the whitest end-of-day light
          the walls white too it felt not just like we were above
          ground but that in spite of being in Covent
          Garden we were on a ridge above a
          forest looking down our feet in
          thicket dark our heads
          in thickest
          stars.

This is a wonderful story, telling us of his search for his white jumper. The format changes throughout the narrative and his reading caught this perfectly. You need to have a look at the full work.

Indeed all three poets deserve more attention. As a taster this was a wonderful introduction to their work.

Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner have done an amazing job curating the performances and events over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone on YouTube! To access: follow the poetry on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (2) by Jon Wilkins

After yesterday’s wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival, I was lucky enough to take part in an "Ecopoetry and Found Poetry" workshop held by Carrie Etter and Caleb Parkin.

As I stated yesterday one thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world of poetry, in this case through Zoom. The Sheaf Poetry Festival is led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her fantastically hardworking team of Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner and held over the weekend of November 20-22, 2020.

Prior to the workshop, we were sent some downloadable documents about the threats of climate change and oil development to Alaska.

I will concentrate on Carrie Etter's workshop. Immediately she engaged with the audience and a conversation was started. She explained to me and 24 other participants what Eco Poetry and Found Poetry was.

Ecopoetry is any poetry with an ecological basis.

She spoke of Found Poetry and gave us a definition to work from by the Academy of American Poets (a great resource in itself). They thought Found Poetry was a refashioning of existing text, the literary equivalent of a collage, which is a beautiful thought.

Bringing these two concepts together, Carrie showed examples from the work of Wendy Mulford, Kathleen Jamie, and Peter Reading - all poets I will now engage with as their work seems to be innovative and extremely readable.

Carrie spoke of the four techniques to be used in Found Poetry: Erasure, Interspersal, Dramatic Monologue and Shape and described how they worked in the context of the poem.

Caleb brought up the question of plagiarism and told us we had to be careful but in most cases, we would be covered by free use. The exception was song lyrics as they could cost a fortune if used, but song titles were in the public domain.

Carrie spoke of changing the music of words which is a beautiful phrase and if you contemplate writing some Found Poetry, it is what you should keep in your head.

So we had the Alaskan documents in front of us and the writing began!

This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

Review of Sheaf Poetry Festival (1) by Jon Wilkins

One thing about the pandemic is that it is opening up new windows onto the world that I would never have thought of before. Visiting a poetry festival online for one. I took the opportunity of visiting the Sheaf Poetry Festival led by Festival Director Suzannah Evans and her Festival Team Angelina D’Roza, Brian Lewis, Katie McLean, Ellen McLeod, Amy Smith, and Elle Turner over the weekend of November 20-22. This was a pay what you feel festival and easily accessible to everyone and anyone. Oh, the beauty of Zoom and YouTube! Covid has certainly been a boon to both these platforms! To access: follow them all on @SheafPoetryFest and visit www.facebook.com/SheafPoetryFestival where the performances will be available after the weekend has finished. The website for Sheaf Poetry Festival is here.

Saturday I watched performances by three Carcanet Press poets, namely Isabel Galleymore, Mina Gorji & Kei Miller.

Mina Gorji is an emigrant from Iran and her poems echo her upbringing and her travel. She read short poems full of simple rhymes and rhythms with haunting echoes of where she had come from. The unusual “Tenacity of Dust” is short and sweet and to the point. She wrote of the migration of Pinkfoot Geese in Norfolk in “Writing into Winter”:

          Across the sky …
          V M V W M V I
          More foreign than Icelandic runes.
          The skein of geese is spelling out a secret song.

As she read those words I could see the geese fly. A beautiful description. She talked of the relationship between nature and the natural. To highlight this she talked of the Oak Gall Wasp another emigrant to our country brought here to use their gall to make ink. Something else I learnt today! "Smuggled in Aleppo Oak / An alien acorn.”

She moved to the UK when five and her poems reflect this idea of migration and immigration of spiders in fruit or dandelions to the New World. Her story is all connected to this feeling of being an alien in a foreign world.

I don’t suppose you could be more of an alien than as a resident poet in the Amazon, but that is what Isabel Galleymore did and the poems she read showcased this.

Her prose poem on spider monkeys told us “ … each limb an animal of its own.”

When discussing the moth trap she captured the atmosphere of the Jungle when she wore a blouse that acted as a second moth trap. She found the atmosphere of the jungle full of sex and death, She had mixed and matching feelings of past and present of home and in Brazil. Her language is sensual. “I can’t stop the air indulging in me.”

She knows that “ … the more I let myself be touched the less I will be bitten.” We see and feel the crawl of insects upon flesh in hair, on clothes.

We meet the scarlet macaws and the visitors give them names, humanising them and then watching them argue and flirt as if they really were human. They try to communicate but fail and then they cant bear to look into each other’s eyes when they leave, having failed to connect with the birds.

She has however connected with the reader and as with Miona Gorij I think you should read more of Isabel's work.

Kei Miller read several poems and his final one about homophobia in Jamaica is stunning. His protagonist had to leave his village when he was outed. He said, “When I left I went through the bushes because if I’d taken the road they’d have killed me.”

Miller had hoped he'd never hear that again. Unfortunately, it was not to be. A dark and eloquently tragic anti-paean to homophobic attitudes.

What a wonderful introduction to the Sheaf Poetry Festival.

About the reviewer
Jon Wilkins is sixty-five. He has a gorgeous wife Annie and two beautiful sons, and loves to write. He is a retired teacher, lapsed Waterstones’ bookseller and former Basketball Coach. He taught PE and English for twenty years and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years.  He has always loved books and reading. You can read a review of Jon's recent novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, here. His website is here. 

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/