La Biblioteka

Claire Carroll with Daisy Hildyard: The Unreliable Nature Writer
2024-06-18 18:30 - 20:00 (Europe/London)
At La Biblioteka

Join us during Indie Bookshop Week at La Biblioteka as we delve into the complex relationships between humans and nature in the face of shifting climates and other global crises. We are thrilled to host debut author Claire Carroll in conversation with renowned author Daisy Hildyard for a compelling discussion that promises to challenge and inspire, in celebration of the publication of Claire’s debut collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer,

This event promises to be a thought-provoking dialogue on the intersection of literature, climate change, and our ongoing connection to the natural world. Whether you’re an avid reader, an environmental enthusiast, or someone concerned about the future of our planet, this conversation will offer valuable insights and spark meaningful discussions.

Join us at the bar from 6.30 pm for a prompt start at 6.45 pm

All books will be available to buy and sign on the night.

About the books:

The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, macabre and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll. Shortlisted for The White Review Prize and winner of the Short Fiction Wild Writing Prize, Carroll portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely exposing housing applications and cows.

Emergency is a novel about the dissolving boundaries between all life on Earth. Stuck at home alone under lockdown, a woman recounts her 1990s childhood in rural Yorkshire. She watches a kestrel hunting, helps a farmer with a renegade bull, and plays out with her best friend, Clare. Around her in the village, her neighbours are arguing, keeping secrets, caring for one another, trying to hold down jobs. In the woods and quarry there are foxcubs fighting, plants competing for space, ageing machines, and a three-legged deer who likes cake. These local phenomena interconnect and spread out from China to Nicaragua as pesticides circulate, money flows around the planet, and bodies feel the force of distant power. A story of remote violence and a work of praise for a persistently lively world, brilliantly written, surprising, evocative and unsettling, Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency reinvents the pastoral novel for the climate change era.

About the authors:

Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is also a PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental writing – particularly short stories and prose-poetry – can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world.

Claire’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story My Brain is Boiling with Ideas was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story Cephalopod was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are taken from The Unreliable Nature Writer, Claire’s collection of linked short stories that examines the interconnection of climate anxiety, surviving late capitalism and dealing with personal loss.

Daisy Hildyard’s first novel, Hunters in the Snow, received the Somerset Maugham Award and a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium at the USA National Book Awards. Her essay The Second Body, a brilliantly lucid account of the dissolving boundaries between all life on earth, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2017. She lives with her family in North Yorkshire, where she was born.

Location:

Hideaway / La Biblioteka

And Other Stories Summer Party
2024-08-13 18:30 - 21:00
🎉On Tuesday, 13 August, the annual summer celebration of And Other Stories arrives at La Biblioteka, welcoming writers Andrzej Tichý and Tim Etchells. Tichý will read from his acclaimed debut collection of stories, Purity, translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley, which And Other Stories just published. Etchells will also be reading from new work.

Copies of Tichý’s and Etchell’s work, including Tichý’s International Booker longlisted novel, Wretchedness, and Endland, Etchell’s brutal, comical series of cautionary tales, will be on sale.

A paid bar will be provided!

We cannot wait to celebrate with you!

Sheffield Feminist Book Club: August author special with Caroline Magennis
2024-08-14 19:00 - 21:00 | La Biblioteka, Leah's Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield, S3 4HP, United Kingdom
August’s author event

Join us for our latest author event, where we’ll sit down with Caroline Magennis, to discuss her fantastic book Harpy: A Childfree Manifesto on Wednesday 14 August, 7-9:00 pm at La Biblioteka, Sheffield.

Bits to remember:

This event is open to all and you’ll get an opportunity to ask Caroline questions, get your book signed and meet plenty of other book lovers!

Date – Wednesday 14 August

Time – 7-9:00pm

Venue – La Biblioteka, 61 Eyre Lane, Sheffield, S1 3GF

About the book:Each generation has more childfree women than the one before. For many, it is an active decision made for a wide range of reasons.Despite this growing trend, we continue to live in a society where women are often judged for deciding to remain child-free – for not conforming to narrow expectations. For being a Harpy.

In this timely and thoughtful book, Caroline Magennis looks beyond the often-divisive conversation around women who choose to be childfree and offers an alternative message of hope and celebration.With humour and intelligence, she explores why motherhood isn’t right for everybody and how any woman – whether a parent or childfree – can live a full life, while also reminding the reader that your freedoms and the right to autonomy should never be taken for granted.

About Caroline Magennis:

Caroline Magennis is an academic and writer based in Manchester. Her writing has appeared in The Independent, Prospect Magazine and The Irish Times. Her book, Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles, has been named the joint winner of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize 2022.

Ticket prices:

Tickets for this event are £13. If you cannot afford them then just drop us an email at: sheffieldfembookclub@gmail.com and we’ll see what we can do.

Refund policy:

We are over the moon that our events are becoming so popular, so because of that we have made are operating a no refund policy. We are more than happy for you to use your ticket for a future book club, or to give your ticket to a fellow book club member, but as of 2024 – we will no longer giving refunds. Apologies in advance!

Sheffield Feminist Book Club House Rules:

We welcome feminists from all walks of life and backgrounds, and this group is open to everyone – we want this to be a fully inclusive space;

You don’t need to be an ‘expert feminist’ (whatever that means) to be involved – we want to read books that everyone can enjoy, and that cater to people’s different experiences and understandings of feminism;

This is primarily a social space, for meeting and getting to know like-minded people – so while feminism can be a heavy topic, we hope to keep this more on the fun side;

This is a judgement free zone – don’t belittle or undermine other members, or those who don’t have the same ideas as you. Don’t shut down other people’s views and be respectful;

If you feel like anyone goes against any of these values, let us know!

Book Launch - Linda Stewart-Pitts: The World Student Games, Sheffield 1991
2024-09-28 18:00 - 20:00
at La Biblioteka, Leah’s Yard

Join us for a nostalgic journey back to the 1991 World Student Games in Sheffield.

Linda Pitts’ new photobook, The World Student Games Sheffield 1991, by Cafe Royal Books offers a captivating glimpse into this historic sporting event. Rediscover the athletes, the locations, and the lasting impact the games – which came at a time of huge potential for the city, and their own way, transformative – had on the city, at a time of renewed optimism and potential.

We invite you to join us at Leah’s Yard for a special event celebrating the launch of this fascinating publication.

This and a selection of Cafe Royal Books will be available to buy and get signed on the night.

About the book:

The Spirit of ‘91

Around the turn of the millennium I landed my first job, at Don Valley Stadium, working as a gym assistant and general dogsbody for Sheffield International Venues, a council-run enterprise set up in 1988 ahead of the World Student Games. To save money I would walk two and a half miles from our terrace house in Firth Park, over Jenkin Hill near the Brendan Ingle boxing gym, and through Attercliffe, the old Industrial area, to get to work. I remember the ominous cries and thuds of heavy machinery, that always seemed both loud and distant, and echoed through a landscape that had seen better days. Then I’d enter this huge underused sporting facility in the middle of it all, which held its own echoes, though I loved the job and the building, which I thought of as a giant playground. The rubber floors looked like Lego, the support columns and beams were exposed in childish colours, and there was hardly anything to do, so I spent most of my time daydreaming, or racing around the cavernous interior and outdoor race track in a golf buggy pretending to complete various chores.

I couldn’t have put it into words then, but what all this amounts to is my coming of age at a time when Sheffield felt haunted by various, multilayered failed visions; of growing up in the wreckage of futures that never arrived. The modernism championed by John L Womersley, the postwar city planner who reimagined Sheffield after the Blitz, had by the end of the century largely fallen into decrepitude, left covered in graffiti or hidden behind late 80s postmodern cladding – brutalist buildings tarted up with primary colours and cheap ornamental gestures. Even during the New Labour boom time, Meadowhall Shopping Centre, erected on the grounds of an old steel works in 1990, was reminiscent of The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, riddled with the ghosts of what came before, or what might have been. Now, those attempts at covering up the industrial decline are fading too; Don Valley stadium is no more, Meadowhall is a shadow of its former self, and any infrastructure in those once vibrant 80s hues looks ghostly and weather worn.

But these images taken by my Mum, Linda, when she worked as a volunteer for the World Student Games, take me back to a moment of optimism. We’d just returned from a brief and utterly bonkers stint living in Japan at the height of its bubble economy in 1990, the year in which Nelson Mandela was released from prison, Germany was reunified, and the UK grew closer to Europe than ever before, set to join the EEC by 1992. Sheffield’s hosting of the games was controversial even at the time (the huge debt accrued only paid off this year), but part of an attempt to reimagine a city – whose industrial heritage had been decimated during Thatcher’s reign – as a city of sport and leisure. I was there with my Mum as a child, and remember the buzzing international atmosphere around the student village, housed in a now demolished section of the brutalist Hyde Park Flats. For my family, having just returned from affluent Tokyo, seeing the world come to Sheffield was a welcome reminder of something bigger than our struggling hometown, and signalled a future of global connectedness. Yet it still amazes me, as I look at these photos, that they were taken on the same camera my parents used to take images of the neon-lit futurism in Japan only a year earlier, and calls to mind the words of Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson; “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”. 1991 was the year Gibson wrote his novel “The Difference Engine,” which explores this very idea. What is left, then, is a reminder that the relationship between working class communities and globalisation has always been complex and often ambivalent.

Johny Pitts, 2024

About the photographer:

Linda Stewart-Pitts met her husband, an American soul singer, at Peter Stringfellow’s Mojo Club in Sheffield. Together, they raised three children. In her 50s, Linda returned to education, earning a BTEC National Diploma in Travel and Tourism, a Degree in Recreation and Tourism Management, a PGCE in Teaching, and a Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. She retired at 60 as a Civil Servant and is also a member of British Mensa. Her background, passion for travel, and qualifications led her to volunteer for the World Student Games, and as they say, the rest is history.

Location:

S1 4HP

DADADA Zine presents Pete Dale (solo, live)
2024-11-16 10:30 - 11:00
At La Biblioteka

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We’re incredibly excited to be hosting DADADA Zine, which will present a pre-matinee solo performance by Pete Dale, of Milky Wimpshake and Knitting Circle fame, fresh from playing Hallamshire House the night before.

This will be an incredibly intimate, acoustic all-ages gig.

Appropriately, coffee and bakery treats from Meersbrook’s finest bakery I Said Bread will be available to perk you up!

About the performer/author:

Pete Dale studied at Sunderland Polytechnic 1989-92. On graduating, he played in several indie/punk underground bands (Pussycat Trash, Red Monkey, Milky Wimpshake) and set up the cult DIY label/distributor Slampt which ran very successfully between 1992 and 2000. Taking up school teaching in 2001, Pete completed an MA in Music (2005) and then a PhD at Newcastle (2010) whilst simultaneously working as a teacher. He took an early career fellowship at Oxford Brookes in 2012, subsequently becoming Senior Lecturer in Music at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2013 (2013-21). He is currently Lecturer in Music Education at University of York. His monographs include Anyone Can Do It: Tradition, Empowerment and the Punk Underground (Ashgate, 2012), Popular Music and the Politics of Novelty (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Engaging Students with Music Education: DJ Decks, Urban Music and Child-centred Learning (2017). A forthcoming monograph on the evolution of indie as a genre across the 1980s is currently near completion. Pete is associate editor of the Punk & Post–Punk journal and a founding member of the Punk Scholars Network.

Location:

La Biblioteka

Jemima Foxtrot with Suzannah Evans: Treasure, Green
2024-11-26 19:00 - 20:30
At La Biblioteka

Treasure & RSVP

Green & RSVP

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Join us for the Sheffield Launch of Jemima Foxtrot’s Treasure, supported by Sheffield poet Suzannah Evans with a reading from her new pamphlet Green.

Jemima Foxtrot’s Treasure is a shining work of alchemy and liberation, exploring power dynamics, sex work, desire, and female friendship with a fresh and playful perspective. Foxtrot investigates shimmering sexualities, the economies of desire, the theft of childhood and pathways towards reclaiming it. Her language is lush: intimate, intricate, full of fertile earth’s possibility. The poems of Treasure live up to its name: showing us where the gold is—the joy—how to feed it into the soil of our lives.

“Foxtrot is a savvy, sometimes savage, sensualist; her poetic speakers alert to injustice, but alive to pleasure in every way that counts. These are superbly tactile poems, full of wit, vigour and feminist jouissance.” — Fran Lock

Suzannah Evans’ new pamphlet introduces us to Green, half human, half angry nature spirit. Green serves as a stunt double for our rage and complicity in nature’s destruction, showing us nature’s delights so we may mourn their loss more deeply.

Location:

La Biblioteka, Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield, S1 4HP

S1 4HP

Intermezzo: Sheffield Feminist Book Club
2024-11-28 19:00 - 21:00
At La Biblioteka

Tickets (via eventbrite)

Come join us for our next book club meeting at La Biblioteka on 28 November at 7pm where we will be discussing Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. Grab a bite to eat or drink, settle in, and get ready for some lively discussions with fellow book lovers.

Whether you’ve read the book cover to cover or just want to listen in, all are welcome to join the conversation (disclaimer: spoilers will be discussed!). Let’s dive into the themes, characters, and everything in between. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect with like-minded individuals and explore feminist literature together. See you there!

About the book:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking..

About the author:

Sally Rooney is a writer who has been dubbed “the first great millennial novelist” after publishing several well-received novels that highlight issues of class inequality, intimacy, art, and politics in the 21st century. Her best-known novel is Normal People (2018), which she adapted into a popular television miniseries in 2020.

Ticket prices:

Tickets for this event are £13. If you cannot afford them then just drop us an email at: sheffieldfembookclub@gmail.com and we’ll see what we can do.

Refund policy:

We are over the moon that our events are becoming so popular, so because of that we have made are operating a no refund policy. We are more than happy for you to use your ticket for a future book club, or to give your ticket to a fellow book club member, but as of 2024 – we will no longer giving refunds. Apologies in advance!

The Feminist Book Club House Rules:

We welcome feminists from all walks of life and backgrounds, and this group is open to everyone – we want this to be a fully inclusive space;You don’t need to be an ‘expert feminist’ (whatever that means) to be involved – we want to read books that everyone can enjoy, and that cater to people’s different experiences and understandings of feminism;This is primarily a social space, for meeting and getting to know like-minded people – so while feminism can be a heavy topic, we hope to keep this more on the fun side;This is a judgement free zone – don’t belittle or undermine other members, or those who don’t have the same ideas as you. Don’t shut down other people’s views and be respectful;

If you feel like anyone goes against any of these values, let us know!

Location:

S1 4HP

DADADA presents Amelia Fletcher & Rob Pursey
2024-12-01 11:00 - 11:30
At La Biblioteka

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DADADA returns with beloved Oxford indie-pop pioneers Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey of legendary pop band Heavenly. They will perform songs from their duo project The Catenary Wires at our bookshop for a rare and intimate Sunday morning performance. Amelia and Rob have been influential figures in the indie-pop scene from their debut band Talulah Gosh, they went on to form Heavenly who have crafted some of the most perfectly formed guitar pop of the past three decades led by Amelia’s distinctive vocals. Amelia and Rob went on to take part in many other musical projects including Tender Trap and, most recently Swansea Sound. Get ready for a magical collision of jangle and genius under the bookshop lights.

This will be an incredibly intimate, acoustic all-ages gig.

Appropriately, coffee and bakery treats from Meersbrook’s finest bakery I Said Bread will be available to perk you up!

Location:

S1 4HP

Adrian Tierney-Jones: A Pub for all Seasons
2025-03-11 18:30 - 20:30
at Leah’s Yard

Ticket & Book

Ticket & Voucher

Join us for an intimate evening during Sheffield Beer Week as we welcome celebrated beer writer Adrian Tierney-Jones to Leah’s Yard. The author will be reading from his magical new work “A Pub For All Seasons,” exploring British pub culture through the changing seasons.

Enjoy drinks from the Hop Hideout bar while soaking in the stories.

About the book:

Ever since he was old enough to enjoy them, award-winning journalist and beer-expert Adrian Tierney-Jones has been visiting and drinking in pubs all over the country.

As the world opened up post-Covid and we were all finally able to return to our locals, Adrian’s love for this British institution burned even brighter and he promised himself he would travel around the UK in search of the best pub he could find. The story of one man through the year and his travels to all corners of the country, A Pub For All Seasons follows Adrian as he visits far-flung corners of the country. From mellow, gentle pubs in autumn and dim, cosy spots in winter to bright, lively bars in spring and wondrous, buzzing gardens in summer, Adrian speaks to locals and landlords, hears unique sounds and stories, and samples food, drink and atmosphere.

He watches the wild and beautiful similarities, differences between pubs, and notices how they all shift, tonally, throughout the year. And what started as a simple quest to find a nice place to sit and drink, ends up revealing to Adrian so much more: the secret to what truly makes the perfect British local across the four seasons.

About the author:

Adrian Tierney-Jones is an award-winning journalist and writer on beer, travel and pubs and was Beer Writer of Year in 2017. He loves nothing better than to wander cities, towns and the countryside lovingly and visit their pubs and bars. He has contributed to many magazines and newspapers and books include The Seven Moods of Craft Beer and United Kingdom of Beer, and has also edited three editions of 1001 Beers to Try Before You Die. He is often to be found in front of an audience with a glass telling tales of drinking beer in bars across the world. He lives in Exeter.

Location:

Leah’s Yard, Cambridge Street, Sheffield, S1 4HP

S1 4HP

A Walk about Studio Electrophonique
2025-06-15 14:00 - 16:00
At La Biblioteka

Join us for a fascinating walking tour through Sheffield city centre celebrating the launch of “Studio Electrophonique” by Jamie Taaylor. This guided journey will take you through the musical landmarks that shaped Sheffield’s influential electronic music scene of the 1980s.

Discover the spaces and places that inspired groundbreaking artists like The Human League, Heaven 17, Pulp, and ABC as we explore the city that fostered a unique DIY music culture during a time of industrial decline.

Perfect for music enthusiasts, local history buffs, and anyone interested in Sheffield’s rich cultural heritage!

About the book:

The amazing story of the home studio that helped launch some of Britain’s most beloved bands.

The Sheffield space age began in 1961, when local mechanic Ken Patten won a tape-recording competition by recreating the sound of a rocket launch using a pencil and a bicycle pump.

In the decades that followed, the makeshift home studio he constructed became the launch pad for a group of young musicians who would shape the futuristic sound of 1980s pop. The Human League, Heaven 17, Pulp, ABC and others made their early recordings with Ken, whose DIY ethic was the perfect fit for a city facing industrial decline but teeming with ideas.

Studio Electrophonique tells the story of a generation seeking new frontiers in music, using everything they could lay their hands on – from science fiction novels to glam rock, Dada art and cheap electronics – to get there. Drawing on original interviews with Jarvis Cocker, Martyn Ware, Mark White and others, it brings to light a world of humour, charm, creativity and unfounded yet undaunted self-belief.

About the author:

Jamie Taylor is a writer and filmmaker from Sheffield. He is the director of The Campaigners and A Film about Studio Electrophonique.

Location:

Simon Mason with Russ Thomas: The Woman Who Laughed
2025-06-25 18:00 - 20:00
At La Biblioteka

Join us for an evening with acclaimed author Simon Mason, in conversation with Sheffield’s own Russ Thomas, as they delve into Simon’s gripping new novel—a haunting crime story set in the aftermath of the 2020 lockdowns. When the bag of a murdered sex worker reappears five years after her disappearance, old wounds are reopened and new questions arise. With themes of justice, memory, and the unseen lives in our cities, this promises to be a powerful and thought-provoking event.

About the book:

In the first months of 2020, there was a spate of murders of Black sex workers in northern cities. One of them was Ella Bailey, last seen talking to a punter in an alley in Sheffield city centre, and although no trace of her was ever found, the punter, Michael Godley, soon confessed to all three murders. Five years later, as another sex worker is murdered in the same district, the bag Ella had been carrying with her reappears, hanging on the door handles of a café, and a local vagrant claims to have seen Ella sitting on a bench in a churchyard near the site of the murder.

South Yorkshire Police call in the Finder. So begins a search that takes him back to the strange days of the pandemic, to talk to those who knew Ella best, such as her wayward girlfriend ‘Loz’, abusive boyfriend Caine Poynton-Smith and respectable foster-parents still struggling to come to terms with Ella’s life. How did their intelligent, strong-willed daughter, a bright student and national schoolgirl athletics champion, end up in that alley?

As fear grips the city, our Finder must court danger to discover the truth.

About the author:

Simon Mason has pursued parallel careers as a publisher and an author, whose YA crime novels Running Girl, Kid Got Shot and Hey, Sherlock! feature the sixteen-year-old slacker genius Garvie Smith. A former Managing Director of David Fickling Books, where he worked with many wonderful writers, including Philip Pullman, he has also taught at Oxford Brookes University and has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter College, Oxford.

Location:
