Events, Book Launches and Talks

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 …

Join us to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Handheld Press in Bath! The founder of Handheld Press, Kate Macdonald, will give a talk at Topping & Co in celebration of the fifth anniversary of this excellent independent publisher. All details and ticket registration here.

The Handheld bookstall will be at St Andrews Church Centre, Clevedon, Somerset, all day Saturday for the 2022 Clevedon Literary Festival. Kate will also be giving a talk on Lost Authors and What To Do With Them. Follow the link to see the programme and how to buy tickets for talks.

Join Melissa Edmundson and Kate Macdonald at this online discussion for Westminster Libraries about these great forgotten supernatural authors, the Australian novelist Helen de Guerry Simpson and the reclusive British historical novelist D K Broster. You can register for your free ticket here.

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.

Register for this free online event here.

To launch 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.

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. The link for free registration will be posted in August.

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. The link for free registration will be posted in August.

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. The link to register for this free online talk for the Guildhall Library, London, will be posted in August.

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.

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. The link for free registration will be posted in August.