The Reader celebrates Sefton Borough of Culture with host of live streams with special guest authors

The Reader in Calderstones Park will be helping Sefton this year as the Liverpool City Region’s Borough of Culture.

The full lineup for The Reader’s celebration of Sefton Borough of Culture has been unveiled. It will see some of the areas favourite writers host live readings and sessions over Zoom during February and March.

Joanne Harris

Thursday 18 February, 6pm

Joanne Harris’ short stories are firm favourites with Shared Reading groups. She has published novels, short stories, screenplays, libretti, game scripts, two cookery books and a musical, and she sings with The Storytime Band. Her many works include Chocolat, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. She will be joining us live to read from and talk about Orfeia, the latest in a series of short novels which re-imagine folk stories.

Kei Miller

Thursday 11 March, 6pm

Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist, with four collections of poems published. His wonderful readings bring out the musical quality of his poems. He will be joining us live to read from and talk about poems from his last two books The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, which looks at how places exist as much in the imagination as in their landscapes, and in nearby bushes which continues his evocations of contemporary Jamaica.

Max Porter

Thursday 25 March, 6pm

Max Porter’s two books Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny are genuinely difficult to categorise. Are they novels? Are they poems? Does it matter? The vibrancy and energy of his writing speaks for itself. He will be joining us to read from and talk about Lanny, a book set in a modern English village. It’s part mystery, part myth, part environmental polemic. Max loves being asked questions so come along prepared to really go for it!

Hosted on Zoom, for the first part of the session you’ll be broken up into small break-out groups to spend an hour taking a deep dive close Shared Reading of an extract from the text guided by a Reader Leader.

Then, following a short break, we’ll come back together and be joined by the author for a live reading and the opportunity to take part in a Q&A hosted by Andrew Forster, our Shared Reading projects manager at The Reader.