We offer these useful services:
If you’re interested, email us at enquiries@ handheldpress.co.uk
- talks, in-person and online (free)
- book stalls at fairs and conventions
- book launches
- mentoring for the Society of Young Publishers
Coming up …
Monday 8 August, 7.30pm
Book launch! Weird horror, but make it ladylike …. D K Broster’s From the Abyss
Join us to launch this new collection of D K Broster’s forgotten Weird short stories upon the world. Melissa Edmundson will be talking to Kate about how she selected the stories, what the images and preoccupations that Broster’s work reveal and how Broster wrote Weird horror in a very ladylike guise.
Raising the Middlebrow Book Club, 27 August
Kate will be talking to the Goodreads reading group Raising the Middlebrow Book Club on Saturday 27 August, at 7pm UK time. It’ll be an online chat and Q&A, for members to find out about all things Handheld, and to talk about their favourite books.
Wednesday 21 September, 5-6pm
Talking about Strange Relics, archaeology and the supernatural
To celebrate our new anthology of alarming supernatural stories about the things that emerge through archaeology, join Amara Thornton (University of London), Katy Soar (University of Winchester) and our very own Kate Macdonald (ex English Heritage) in a talk for Westminster Libraries to discuss the gritty things under the fingernails of the soul, and why there are no mummies in Strange Relics.
The link to register for this free online event will be posted soon.
Tuesday 27 September, 2-3pm: Single London Ladies
Join us for an online talk for the Guildhall Library, London about how single women lived in London in the interwar years, looking at their lives in Handheld’s fiction, biography and memoir. Includes novels by Rose Macaulay, Marjorie Grant, Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford, and the life of Valentine Ackland. Register for your free ticket here.
Tuesday 18 October, 2-3pm
Women’s Weird in London: the supernatural Metropolis
Dip into the extensive range of Handheld’s supernatural short story anthologies to find forgotten stories about London at its most spooky. This online talk for the Guildhall Library, London, paces the London pavements in stories by Edith Stewart Drewry, Margaret Irwin, Margery Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Elinor Mordaunt and May Sinclair. Register for your free ticket here.
Tuesday 15 November, 2-3pm
Book launches! Forgotten novelist of flight, John Llewelyn Rhys
On 5 August 1940 the novelist and RAF flight instructor John Llewelyn Rhys died when his plane crashed in a training accident. His last book, English Is My Village, won the 1942 Hawthornden Prize. One of the lost voices of British aviation, reviewers routinely compared him to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Handheld will be republishing all his writing in two volumes. You can register for this free online talk for the Guildhall Library, London, here.
Wednesday 16 November, 6-7pm: John Llewelyn Rhys and 1930s aviation
The Welsh novelist and pilot John Llewelyn Rhys wrote two noveks and a collection of short stories before he was killed in 1940, aged 29. His widow, the novelist Jane Oliver (co-author of Handheld’s bestseller Business as Usual) set up the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in his memory, ‘to give other young writers a chance that he didn’t get’. Join Luke Seaber (University College London) in conversation with Kate from Handheld in a talk for Westminster Libraries to discuss Rhys’s place in aviation literature, his powerful writing and the legacy of the literature of flight.
The link to register for this free talk will be posted in August.
Tuesday 29 November, 2-3pm
The invented department stores of London
Join Kate Macdonald of Handheld Press and Tessa Boase, author of London’s Lost Department Stores, for an online conversation for the Guildhall Library, about London’s fake, fictional and wholly invented shops. Register here for your free ticket.
