As well as launching our books in bookshops, we often sell Handheld Press books at book fairs, conventions, conferences and AGMs, depending on the subject.
If you’d like to book a Zoom talk (no fee), email us.
Kate also gives talks about publishing and design to large and small groups, and runs workshops on how publishing works for aspiring authors (and publishers).
Have you discovered the Handheld Book Club?
It’s our online monthly salon where we talk books with special guests.
You can find out more here.
Valentine Ackland at the British Library
Frances Bingham will be give a talk at a British Library online event on Wednesday 23 June at 19.30.
Join Frances for an in-depth look into Ackland’s life based on her new book, Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life. In this absorbing talk Frances will explore the ways in which Ackland enacted her resistance to traditional gender roles – through cross-dressing, usurping male privileges, writing erotic poems, loving women – and the dangerous costs of this gender deviance, from being disowned by her father to being under MI5 surveillance. Book your free Zoom tickets for Transgressive Voice here.
Recovering women’s lives
On Wednesday 7 July, 17-18h, Kate will be in conversation with Lucy Scholes of the Virago Books podcast Our Shelves, and regular contributor to The Paris Review, the Financial Times, the Times, and the Telegraph, talking about retrieving women’s voices from the library vaults, and what makes a modern best-seller of women’s novels that are already generations old.
This is a free online event for City of Westminster libraries. You can register for it here.
Normalising disability through fiction
On Wednesday 13 October Kate will be talking to bioethicist Tom Shakespeare about normalising disability in fiction, and novels in which disability is just another aspect of the characters’ lives. This will include The Exile Waiting by the late Vonda N McIntyre, a masterclass on writing a society in which everyone is living with impairment, but some impairments are deadly and some have wings; and So Lucky by Nicola Griffith, in which Mara loses, in one week, her wife, her job, and control of her body when she gets a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
There are so many other stories to talk about in which disability is normal: bring your own suggestions for what we could all be reading.
This is an event for City of Westminster libraries. Registration details coming soon.
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Telling LGBTQ+ stories
On Wednesday 15 September Kate will be talking to Frances Bingham, author of Valentine Ackland, to discuss the practicalities of publishing LGBTQ+ stories, in fiction, poetry and non-fiction, and the life and complicated affairs of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner in Dorset and beyond.
This is an event for City of Westminster libraries. Registration details coming soon.
BristolCon, 30 October 2021
BristolCon is back! We will be running our book stall at this excellent local science fiction and fantasy convention in Bristol on 30 October, and we may also be running a special event there: more details to be posted here as they come in!
You can find out all you need about getting to BristolCon here.
