An evening of literary laughs and page turning fun at the festival’s most bookish bingo event! This is your chance to win prizes, test your book smarts, and enjoy a brilliantly unpredictable night.

Tickets must be booked in advance and are £2 per person.

Join local artist Aish for a fantastic drop-in workshop. Unleash your creativity and design your very own book cover! Get crafty with collage or get sketchy with pencils!

Join illustrator Dean Williams, for a creative, drop-in drawing workshop where children can make their own superhero out of fabulous fruit and vegetable drawings!

An hour of poetry from local voices!

Join a diverse group of local poets—young and old, male and female—as they share a rich variety of poems to entertain, enlighten and enliven your day.

 

Whether you’re a lifelong poetry lover or simply curious, come along and brighten your afternoon listening to a selection of poems offering wit, reflection, imagination, and inspiration.

 

Everyone is welcome!

Have you ever met a Hippo horse? Or wanted to change your feet according to the weather? Meet Nutmeg, who invites you to join her on her otherworldly escapes, where curiosity leads the way. Nutmeg has a fresh outlook on global challenges, but will such a small creature manage to solve the world’s problems?

The book Nutmeg, is a fantasy story aimed at 8 years+. It was created by Sally Morris working with illustrator Charlotte Pettifer and published in 2026. It is beautifully illustrated and during this session, following a short talk and readings from the book, visitors can learn how to make a flower entwined with bindweed, inspired by artwork from one of the chapters in the book. The workshop is free of charge and optional.

Join Nathan Gregg on a journey through computational art, a short personal history of his experience using code for art, and a brief workshop, hopefully inspiring you to use computing in your creative practice. Bring a laptop if you wish to join in, but it’s not required. Nathan Gregg accidentally made his own computer paint app — and now his art is weird.

 

Over the past few years, computer code has become an increasingly important part of Nathan’s art practice. That experimentation eventually grew into Journeypaint: a custom-built drawing app with its own quirks, limitations and visual language.

 

In this talk, Nathan will introduce some ideas from computational art, share a few projects that have influenced him, and look at how building his own tools has changed the way he makes work.

 

No programming experience is needed, and there will also be a chance to try Journeypaint for yourself.

 

Invitation to join in with your own laptop.

Can you help an author overcome writer’s block, finish their book, and escape the library before time runs out? You are characters in a story being written by the famous author I. M. Atahlat, but disaster has struck. The author is suffering from a serious case of writer’s block, the deadline is fast approaching, and their publishers won’t stop demanding the finished manuscript!

Work together to solve a series of puzzles, uncover clues, and help complete the story before the clock runs out. Can your team save the book and make your escape? This family-friendly escape room is designed to be accessible for a range of ages, including children aged 7 and over, while still providing a fun challenge for adults. Teams of up to six people will have 30 minutes to crack the puzzles and complete their mission.

Tickets are limited so be sure to book now!

Can you help an author overcome writer’s block, finish their book, and escape the library before time runs out? You are characters in a story being written by the famous author I. M. Atahlat, but disaster has struck. The author is suffering from a serious case of writer’s block, the deadline is fast approaching, and their publishers won’t stop demanding the finished manuscript!

Work together to solve a series of puzzles, uncover clues, and help complete the story before the clock runs out. Can your team save the book and make your escape? This family-friendly escape room is designed to be accessible for a range of ages, including children aged 7 and over, while still providing a fun challenge for adults. Teams of up to six people will have 30 minutes to crack the puzzles and complete their mission.

Tickets are limited so be sure to book now!

A We spend our lives talking to other people, so writing dialogue should be easy. Shouldn’t it?

 

In reality, dialogue is one of the hardest things to get right. Write it exactly as people speak and it can be rambling and dull. Make it work too hard for the story and suddenly your characters stop sounding like real people.

 

In this talk, author Lindsay Woodward explores what makes dialogue believable and why there is so much more going on in a good conversation than just the words being spoken.

 

Lindsay has written 10 novels to date across a range of genres and has a degree in Writing, specialising in scriptwriting. Using examples from her own work, she will explore how character, relationships, conflict and everything left unsaid can transform the conversations on the page.

 

If dialogue is something you struggle with, or you simply want to make yours work harder, come along and discover how to get your characters really talking.

Join local author Rosie Pickering for a read aloud of her books, which include ‘The Jumblebees’ and ‘The Socktopus’.