Foyles

Ben & Grace are in control for our Young Adult special edition of The Storybox Podcast 2017. Taking inspiration from author Olivia Levez's latest book, The Circus, they discuss their favourite circus skills and there's even a quickfire quiz! We then tune in to the Q&A session recorded at the YA Feminism Panel with authors Alwyn Hamilton, Laure Eve and chair Samantha Shannon. The Storybox podcast is produced by WordPlay; to find out more about them and to get in touch, just visit www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

Join Khallum, Iris & Logan as they look back over this week’s Storybox festival events. Our young reporters caught up with illustrator Paul Stickland, learnt a lesson or two on how to create superhero comic strips with author & illustrator Kate Scott & Alex Gunn and even heard an exclusive performance from the cast of Adventures in Wonderland! Storybox 2017 is our children’s and YA book festival taking place across all our shops in London, Bristol, Birmingham and Chelmsford. To see the full line-up for this year's festival, just visit http://www.foyles.co.uk/storybox The Storybox podcast is produced by WordPlay; to find out more about them and to get in touch, just visit http://www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

Join Tess & Felix for the final edition of The Storybox Podcast, covering events in the final week of our 2016 festival. In this episode, we get up close with author David Solomons, hear radio plays performed live from the festival, and catch up with our National Events Co-ordinator, Meg! Storybox 2016 is our children’s and YA book festival taking place over three weeks across all our shops in London, Bristol and Birmingham. The Foyles Storybox podcast is produced by WordPlay http://www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

Join Callum & Jasmine as they look back over this week’s Storybox festival events. Storybox 2016 is our children’s and YA book festival taking place over three weeks across all our shops in London, Bristol and Birmingham. In this episode, we give writer & illustrator Viviane Schwarz a call, we get messy printmaking with illustrator Leigh Hodgkinson, and our very own Head of Promotions, Marion, takes us on an audio tour of our flagship store to find THE best spots to read! For more about Storybox festival and to see the full line up of events, visit http://www.foyles.co.uk/storybox The Foyles Storybox podcast is produced by WordPlay http://www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

This edition of The Storybox Podcast is hosted by festivalgoers Maggie and Hamish as they look back over the first week of the Storybox festival, to share with you interviews with fantastic authors and illustrators, reports from creative workshops, and general Storybox audio fun. Storybox 2016 is our children’s and YA book festival taking place over three weeks across all our shops in London, Bristol and Birmingham. For more about the events taking place and to book, visit www.foyles.co.uk/storybox In this episode we play hide and seek with author and illustrator Dave Barrow, Mrs Phelps from Matilda the Musical performs a very special reading for us, and illustrator Yuval Zommer shares his top tips for drawing bugs! We also caught up with Foyles staff member Fraser to find out his reading habits. Special thanks to everyone who appeared in our podcast and to our fabulous young reporters across all the stores. Enjoy! The Foyles Storybox podcast is produced by WordPlay http://www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

Throughout the 2016 Foyles Storybox Festival, this will be the place to hear festival news, behind the scenes reports, and fantastic author interviews. Brought to you from us - the festival goers! Keep an ear out over the next few weeks for three episodes straight from the festival, and head over to www.foyles.co.uk/storybox for full details about the summer events. The Foyles Storybox Podcast is produced by WordPlay http://www.wordplayeducation.co.uk/

What happened to the future? Verso authors Owen Hatherley and Douglas Murphy seek to explode the distortions of history that obscure our present and future in their new respective books 'The Ministry of Nostalgia' and 'Last Futures'. Excavating the lost archeology of the present day, Douglas Murphy’s 'Last Futures' is a fascinating, mind-bending cultural history of the last avant-garde. Through a cast of architects, dreamers, thinkers, hippies and designers, Murphy diagnoses the source of our current situation and steers us towards powerful alternative futures. In a sharp, witty polemic, Owen Hatherley skewers the contemporary nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed. Why, in an age of austerity, have we adopted the gospel of luxurious poverty, from ubiquitous 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters to the ‘artisinal’? The Ministry of Nostalgia reaches across a depleted cultural landscape to demand more for our society—after all, Hatherley argues, why should we have to 'Keep Calm and Carry On'? Chaired by Shumi Bose, architectural writer, historian, editor and teacher at Central St Martins responsible for coordinating Contextual Studies for BA Architecture: Spaces and Objects, covering architectural history, theory and broader cultural issues. This event was organised in association with New Humanist.

Ever on the hunt for new literary voices, we bring together a panel of authors and an audience of readers to explore the road to publication and what lies beyond. Working with Vintage, we welcome writers Kirsty Logan, Ruth Ware and Vesna Goldsworthy to the stage to talk to journalist and Vintage Podcast host Alex Clark. We settle down to listen to our evening's speakers discussing the development of their work and how they secured industry support. The focus of the night is on discovering new voices in contemporary literature, providing insight into how these authors write and what it's like to be an author at the start of your career. Glasgow-based journalist and author Kirsty Logan won the 2014 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection with 'The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales' before penning breakout debut 'The Gracekeepers'—a magical tale of a floating circus adrift in a flooded world, the telling of which has been compared to the work of luminaries such as Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. Ruth Ware provides the dark chills of the evening in the form of debut psychological thriller 'In a Dark, Dark Wood'. Touted as the next big thing in crime fiction, this is a tale of toxic friendship and power games gone wrong as estranged friends reunite for a hen party in a woodland retreat, in a tightly-plotted whodunit reminiscent of Agatha Christie and Sophie Hannah. Serbian poet and writer Vesna Goldsworthy is also no stranger to print, having previously published nonfiction cultural history 'Inventing Ruritania' and a memoir, 'Chernobyl Strawberries'. This year's Great Gatsby-inspired 'Gorsky' marks her first novel—the eponymous Russian oligarch of which tasks exiled Serbian bookseller Nikola to curate a model library, in an attempt to win the heart of a woman with whom both men are infatuated.

Published by Verso, 'Inventing the Future: Folk Politics and the Left' is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism which, following the wave of left-populism across the continent, offers concrete alternatives to the cycle of debt and austerity and the drudgeries of work. From Jeremy Corbyn’s landmark victory in the Labour leadership election to the rise of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, the European left is once more resurgent. Interrogating how ideas that long seemed marginalised and discredited have recently captured the imaginations of millions, authors Williams and Srnicek ask how these ideas might be used to create a more sustainable and equitable world. Demanding a high-tech economy capable of advancing living standards, liberating us from work and developing technologies which expand our freedom, Williams and Srnicek join us to present their new blueprint for a new world—one of full automation, unconditional universal basic income, media reform, full unemployment and freedom from work. Williams and Srnicek talk to Emma Dowling, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Middlesex University.

In conversation with journalist and broadcaster Miranda Sawyer, hear one of our most exciting contemporary artists as she discusses her life, her work and the space where the two converge. BAFTA-winning British filmmaker Carol Morley is fast making her mark as an innovative director and screenwriter of challenging, enthralling subjects. From her compelling docu-drama 'Dreams of a Life', a moving exploration of the life of 39 year old Joyce Carol Vincent, whose body was discovered two years after her death in her Wood Green bedsit, to last year's widely-regarded BFI and BBC film 'The Falling', chronicling the spread of a fainting epidemic in an English girls school. This talk celebrates the publication of her semi-autobiographical debut novel, '7 Miles Out', a darkly funny, poignant and searing portrayal of a teenager growing up in the aftermath of her father’s suicide.

Hear an author who never fails to astound as he discusses his mastery of prose and what it's like to be compared with Vladimir Nabokov, in conversation with journalist Alex Clark. Award-winning Sarajevo-born author Aleksandar Hemon presents 'The Making of Zombie Wars', his first novel since 2008's 'The Lazarus Project'. A book of darkly comic chaos and interpersonal disaster, Zombie Wars offers readers a meta-fictional insight into the life of the author and the contemporary renaissance of zombie fiction, unpicking its connections with cultural violence across all levels. Written in the author's glorious and inventive prose—in a language the author learned well into adulthood, no less—the dazzlingly original Hemon wrestles a genre imbued with cliché in a work at once hilarious and morbid, serious and surreal, offering us both piercing social commentary and a bevy of emotionally insightful characters.

Without doubt one of the publishing events of the year, we welcomed David Lagercrantz to the Foyles auditorium to discuss 'The Girl in the Spider's Web'—his official follow-up to Stieg Larsson's cherished Millennium trilogy—with writer and broadcaster Mark Lawson. Revisit the Millennium universe and reunite with beloved characters Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist as Lagercrantz unpacks this much-anticipated follow-up to the series, ten years on from the publication of 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'.

US novelist Hanya Yanagihara presents 'A Little Life' onstage at Foyles, in conversation with author and Associate Editor of The Bookseller Cathy Rentzenbrink. After enthralling readers and reviewers alike with her debut 'The People in the Trees', Yanagihara's new novel spans the decades-long relationships across a group of four college graduates who move to New York to pursue their various careers—aspiring actor Willem; struggling architect Malcolm; JB, a painter making his way in the art world; and Jude. Withdrawn, enigmatic, crippled by an accident of which he doesn't speak, Jude is haunted, damaged from a childhood kept hidden from his closest friends. Increasingly successful in his career as a lawyer, yet increasingly broken by a past that comes to define him, Jude's position as the dazzling black hole at the centre of the group will come to send shockwaves through the characters—and through the reader too. Still buzzing from its release in the US earlier in the year, this is a profoundly moving work that will leave its mark on the reader and the industry for years to come. Yanagihara unpicks this contemporary literary triumph onstage at Foyles in conversation with Rentzenbrink.

Returning to Foyles to present her heartbreaking, tender, at times funny, and ultimately uplifting memoir, Cathy Rentzenbrink joins friend and author Matt Haig for this conversation event. Rentzenbrink's life was changed in the summer of 1990 when her brother Matty was knocked down by a car, just two weeks before receiving his GCSE results. Gathered around his unconscious body at the hospital, the family desperately prayed for his survival. But as Matty did survive, the question shifted to the condition of his life; eight years on, coming to experience that there are many and various fates worse than death, Rentzenbrink came to realise that she had been praying for the wrong thing.

This March we welcomed superstar chef Raymond Blanc in conversation with Anne Shooter, food writer and Commercial Editor of Mail Online, to discuss his new book and BBC2 TV series, 'Kew on a Plate'. An impassioned, charismatic speaker, Blanc is one of the world's most highly regarded chefs, proudly sporting two Michelin stars and mentoring many of today's other leading chefs. Amid the gardeners' tips and expertise, 'Kew on a Plate' features Raymond's detailed tasting notes and 40 mouth-watering recipes that make the best of produce at its freshest. Learn the perfect variety of apple for his Tarte Tatin or pick the perfect potato for the Sunday roast.

Foyles are delighted to welcome and introduce Kirsty Logan with this reading from her forthcoming debut novel 'The Gracekeepers'. Appearing at our recent event with Reif Larsen and Audrey Niffenegger, Kirsty treated the audience to a section of her hotly-anticipated new book. You'll want to watch out for this one!

Live at Foyles, and in conversation with writer and artist Audrey Niffenegger ('The Time-Traveler's Wife', 'Her Fearful Symmetry'), American author Reif Larsen returned to present his second novel, the kaleidoscopic 'I Am Radar'. From Cambodia to the Congo, from Norway to New Jersey, Larsen's new epic weaves puppetry, quantum physics, secret societies and more into a globe-trotting curiosity cabinet of wonder and delight, as protagonist Radar Radmanovic undertakes a thrilling and mind-bending journey of personal and historical discovery. This event was chaired by journalist Alex Clark.

Prolific writer, journalist and filmmaker Tariq Ali came to Foyles for an evening of provocative debate courtesy of Verso Books. Author of more than twenty books, as a historian, novelist and social commentator, Ali is one of our most committed polemicists. In his latest book, 'The Extreme Centre', the Guardian and London Review of Books contributor and editor at the New Left Review argues that Westminster is in the grip of an extreme centre, a trilateral monolith in which politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market, whilst unstable populist parties occupy the margins. Chairing the event is Danny Dorling, author of 'Inequality and the 1%'.

Bestselling author Matt Haig has, since his 2005 debut 'The Last Family in England', brought us some of the quirkiest, darkest, and often funniest fictions in recent years. But Haig also suffered a breakdown in his early twenties, struck by panic and depression and pushed to the verge of suicide. Haig visited the Auditorium at Foyles in March 2015 to discuss this experience as described in his latest book, 'Reasons to Stay Alive'. Ever frank on the solemn and deeply personal subject of mental ill health, Matt Haig here braves the spotlight to narrate the road that led to his own personal tipping point and, more importantly, how and why he chose to live on. Chaired by Cathy Rentzenbrink, Associate Editor of The Bookseller, Foyles presents a dazzling insight into the mind of an author whose work comes celebrated by luminaries such as Jeanette Winterson, Ian Rankin and Stephen Fry as he talks about a subject that, directly or indirectly, affects so many of us today.

Twisted, gritty, spiked with mordant wit, Gun Machine is the latest bullet from the brain of Warren Ellis. It's the kind of dark detective thriller you won't have read before, but exactly what you'd expect from the award-winning creator of Transmetropolitan, Planetary and Red. Listen to Ellis at Foyles in conversation with journalist and author Sam Leith.

Magic may be nothing more than an ancient superstition, but it still exercises a powerful fascination for us today. Internationally acclaimed cultural historian, critic and novelist Marina Warner has spent her career uncovering fascinating aspects of myth, fairytale, folklore and art and in Stranger Magic she explores 'The Arabian Nights', retelling its lesser-known stories and examining the impact of this Eastern text on Western readers. In this edition on the Foyles Bookcast she shares her ground-breaking research and startling analysis and tells some wonderful stories - though we can't promise all 1,001.

The news that Jim Crace's new novel Harvest would be his last has obviously broken more than a few literary hearts, but before he retires from his award-winning career, we're delighted to offer this chance to hear him on the Foyles Bookcast. Hear more about Harvest's bewitching evocation of an English landscape on the brink of change.

6 November 2012 With dozens of best-selling novels and scores of memorable characters to his name, Alexander McCall Smith is one of Britain's most prolific and beloved authors. The creator of Precious Ramotswe and the The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency has taken his readers to Botswana, Scotland and Germany, and now in Trains and Lovers we embark on an unforgettable railway journey through the heart of Britain, in the company of four perfect strangers. As the train makes its way through the countryside, conversation begins to flow and stories - above all stories of love - begin to be told. Alexander was in conversation with Paul Blezard.

9 November 2012 Author Bryan Talbot dropped into Foyles to talk about Grandville Bête Noire, the third instalment of the phenomenal Grandville series of anthropomorphic steampunk romance thrillers starring Inspector Le Brock. In this interview with Kim Newman, Bryan was joined by his wife Mary Talbot, writer and co-creator of Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, part autobiographical family history, part biography of James Joyce's daughter Lucia. This was a Comica / Foyles event.

Man Booker winning novelist Salman Rushdie discusses his memoir Joseph Anton with journalist David Aaronovitch at The Bloomsbury Theatre in London. This was a Time Out Live / Foyles event.

08 May 2012 Man Booker Prize winner and author of The Famished Road, Ben Okri discusses Wild, his latest book of poetry with theatre journalist Al Senter in the Gallery at Foyles.

5 November 2012 Bestselling crime writer Ian Rankin discusses his latest book Standing In Another Man’s Grave with journalist & blogger Suzi Feay in the Gallery at Foyles.

25 October 2012 Chart-topping author Kate Mosse discusses her book latest novel, Citaldel with the Literary Director of the Southbank James Runcie in the Gallery at Foyles.

12 June 2012 Prolific & bestselling author Martin Amis talks to journalist and author Sam Leith about his novel 
Lionel Asbo: State of England at The Bloomsbury Theatre, London. This was a Time Out Live / Foyles event.

3 July 2012 Broadcaster and author Michael Palin discusses his novel The Truth with author Joseph Connelly in the Gallery at Foyles.