Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
By Maria Bregman – founder and Editor-in-Chief of Creativity’s UK; writer, filmmaker, and UK Global Talent.
At the end of October the Southbank Centre staged three very different literary evenings within forty-eight hours of each other. On Wednesday 28 October, four novelists from four countries appeared in the Purcell Room for a showcase of translated fiction. On Thursday 29 October, in the same room, Tice Cin turned her new novel into a performance of monologue, projection and sound. On Friday 30 October, the winners of the Creative Future Writers’ Award read their work in the Level 5 Function Room of the Royal Festival Hall. Taken in sequence, they say something useful about how books now reach readers in London.
The festival
All three evenings belong to the London Literature Festival, which the Southbank Centre describes as the longest-running celebration of the written and spoken word of its kind in the capital. This year’s programme is curated by Dua Lipa and her Service95 Book Club, and it sits inside the Southbank Centre’s seventy-fifth anniversary year. Guest curators are part of the festival’s tradition: when ArtCulture covered the 2023 edition, the guest curator was George the Poet. This year the programme went to a book club.
A book club that began in 2023 as a monthly pick and a podcast has been given a festival, and the evidence of these three nights is that it has not played safe. Translated fiction, a genre-crossing performance and an emerging-writers showcase sat in the programme on the same footing as the headline conversations, and the rooms I sat in were full.
The translated fiction showcase, 28 October
The Translated Fiction Showcase in the Purcell Room, 28 October 2026. Photo: Maria Bregman
Hosted by Hope Ndaba, the evening brought together Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Nelio Biedermann (Switzerland), Gaël Faye (Rwanda and France) and Intan Paramaditha (Indonesia). Each author read briefly from their own work before the conversation began. One reading took the audience under the surface of a lake, breath held, stones tied at the waist; another opened Biedermann’s Lázár on the evening of Epiphany, with a translucent child with water-blue eyes born in the western wing of a manor house, next to a blue room nobody ever entered.
The English editions behind the evening are a map of routes into the language. Biedermann’s Lázár, which reached MacLehose Press when he was twenty-one, is translated by Jamie Bulloch. Faye’s Jacaranda is translated by Sarah Ardizzone for Chatto & Windus. Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells is translated by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao for Europa Editions. Schweblin’s Good and Evil and Other Stories, like her earlier books, is translated by Megan McDowell.
None of those translators was on the stage. Faye spoke in French through an interpreter, and partway through he stopped to ask whether Sarah was in the room. She was, and he thanked her solemnly, in front of everybody. Paramaditha named her English translators, who could not travel from Australia and New Zealand, and greeted her Polish translator in the audience. Schweblin went further: “Maybe they should be here, not us.”
The following evening, at the same hour and in the same room, Tice Cin presented Safe Spaces, her new novel from Granta, as an interdisciplinary performance about grief, music production and her Turkish Cypriot family home. She was joined on stage by the performers BODUR and Eliza-Rose, with visuals from her Neoprene Genie team and a score by KMNC and Cin herself.
Cin is the author of Keeping the House, a 2021 debut that won a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the British Book Awards. Safe Spaces, a novel about electronic music, love and grief, was won by Granta in a four-way auction and published in September.
Giving the book a performance instead of an interview was the right decision. The novel is partly about sound, and a reading from a lectern would have flattened it. Instead the monologues moved between registers the page can only suggest: a scene in a restaurant over a stolen kebab skewer, a recording studio where a famous visitor drops in and everyone is told to keep it secret, a message to “one of my only friends” who makes the effort to come out to Enfield. Text was projected in green across the screen and the side walls of the hall, so that the audience read and heard the book at once; at one point the walls asked whether a woman wants to be “an independent woman living her life and loving her nephews and nieces, or solely an aunty-mum”. Much of it was delivered from the floor of the stage. In the last stretch the words gave way to music, and the room listened.
The Creative Future showcase, 30 October
The Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase, Royal Festival Hall, 30 October 2026. Photo: Maria Bregman
The week closed upstairs in the Royal Festival Hall, in the glass-walled Level 5 Function Room, with the Creative Future Writers’ Award Showcase. The winners were announced on 15 September; this was the evening on which they read their work. The judges – the poet Nancy Campbell, the novelist Courttia Newland and the journalist Kieran Yates – hosted, the winners’ anthology made its debut, and the event was also streamed free online.
Creative Future, a Brighton-based charity, runs a national writing competition for under-represented writers. This year’s theme was “Material”, and more than 1,850 entries produced fifteen winners across poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, with £25,000 in prizes, courses and development support. More on the evening in a separate piece on the Creative Future showcase.
What the week says
The easiest conclusion to draw from these three evenings is that London has a taste for the international and the adventurous. I would draw a narrower one, about credit.
Four authors, four countries, and, in the English editions of their recent books, five translators: Bulloch, Ardizzone, Epstein, Tsao and McDowell. The event listing named the authors and their countries, not the translators. That is the habit of the trade, this festival is no worse than most, and the authors themselves spent much of the evening arguing against it. “This is the forum where we make the labour visible,” Paramaditha said. On Wednesday the stage did exactly that, out loud.
The other two evenings answered a different question: who gets to be a writer in a room at the Royal Festival Hall? Cin arrived through a publishing auction and a prize-winning debut; the fifteen Creative Future winners arrived through an open competition. A festival that can carry both in the same weekend is doing its job. It is also a reminder that the old distinction between the page and the stage is dissolving in one direction, towards performance, while the distinction between the original and the translation is still waiting to dissolve in the other.
What I would look for in the next edition is small and practical: translators’ names on the event page, in the same type as the authors’.
What comes next
The festival’s partnership with Service95 continues beyond the October weekends. On Saturday 28 November the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar leads a two-hour creative writing masterclass at the Royal Festival Hall, presented with Counterpoints Arts and the Service95 Book Club; it is already sold out. The London Literature Festival itself returns in October 2027.
