‘At this, the man turned in their direction and smiled; he played not for the dream of success but because this new world necessitated beauty of all kinds. The new world was not just labour, but labour for the sake of life-making.’
— Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise

Join us for Hajar Reads: Play. In this reading and discussion group, we’ll reflect on play as a life-affirming practice, considering how embracing play and playfulness can open us up to more expansive ways of thinking, creating and living.

We’ll use short extracts from selected Hajar Press titles—including Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Lola Olufemi), COOP (Nida Sajid) and Seeing for Ourselves (Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan)—as a starting point for our discussion.

Extracts will be shared in advance of the session, but there’s no expectation to have read them all to take part—just come along ready to listen, think and share!

This session, hosted by Hajar Press, will be facilitated by Amber Obasi from Hajar Press and Dr Durre Shahwar.

Dr Durre Shahwar is an interdisciplinary writer, researcher, and artist. She is the author of One of the Good Ones, a pamphlet accompanying her solo photo exhibition on archives, seeking sanctuary, and documentation, exhibited and published in 2026 by Ffotogallery, Cardiff. She is co-editor of Gathering: Women of Colour on Nature (2024) and Just So You Know (2020). Durre has a PhD in autofiction and Pakistani-Welsh identity from Cardiff University and was the recipient of a Future Wales Fellowship. Her work deconstructs established frameworks to present counter-narratives that capture the complexities of lived experiences when situated within social, cultural, political and geographical landscapes. Durre divides her time between South London and Cardiff and is currently working on her debut non-fiction book.

Join Us For A Discussion Of A Global Movement for the Rights of Nature
As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.

In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement—Rights of Nature—taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity.

This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Housmans are delighted to welcome the legendary theorist, thinker and lawyer D.K. Renton to launch what we believe may be one of the most original, and vital, works of left wing thought to appear in recent years. He will be joined in conversation by the scholar and journalist Barnaby Raine.

Forgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious

For too long, revolutionary social movements have reconciled to defeat. We must start winning again. Forgiveness is a crucial strategy for remaking the world, to secure and sustain victories, to transform one-time enemies into friends. With deep political commitment, D. K. Renton makes the case for forgiveness—but of a particularly unruly sort. Tracing the tragic abuse of Eleanor Marx and Jane Wells, the mistakes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye, Renton urges us to forgive, but only after tearing down the citadels of the rich.

Revolutionary Forgiveness connects collective struggle with the individual’s search for justice to demand a better future for all—when the oppressed will be magnanimous in power, and even former oppressors will be free.

“Renton rescues ‘forgiveness’ from the pulpit and returns it, bloodied but lucid, to history.”

— Richard Seymour, author of Disaster Nationalism

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

FREE ENTRY BUT PLEASE RSVP USING THE FROM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE

This event celebrates a Bored Stiff book half a century after a fanzine of that name burst into life at the height of the punk “explosion.”

Original creator Terry Macalister has brought together in contemporary time a group of musicians, photographers and club owners who made the punk scene what it was then and what it has become now.

Laid out in the original way using marker pens and manual typewriters, Bored Stiff, the book, is a totally original and authentic window into what academics have called a “significant cultural intervention.”

With the help of Martin Hand – a graphic designer, Bored Stiff contains interviews with band members from the likes of The Adverts, Penetration and the Menstrual Cramps as well as folk such as Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington who created the Roxy and Vortex punk clubs.

There are also copies in this new book of the original fanzine which include live reviews from the late 1970s of the Sex Pistols, 999 and Iggy Pop and harnesses the raw energy of the early days of punk.

Gaye Advert, the bassist of the Adverts, will be at the book launch to talk about her role in the early punk scene along with Emilia Elfrida, vocalist and songwriter of today’s self-styled lesbian punk band, the Menstrual Cramps.

They will discuss why punk happened, what it means to them and why it has survived albeit in different form 50 years on. Terry and Martin will explain how they put together the new version of Bored Stiff and why they insist on an analogue production that eschews the superficial glamour of the digital print world.

Terry Macalister is the original creator of Bored Stiff and the author of the new compilation of old and new material. Excited by the success of the early fanzine, Terry went on to spend his life in national journalism, most notably as a specialist editor on The Guardian.

He is the author of several books including Crude Britannia (Pluto Press) and Polar Opposites (Guardian ebooks), executive producer of The Oil Machine film and co-producer of the forthcoming Earth Mother documentary. He is the founder of a Cambridge-based protest choir and sees himself now more as artist and activist than journalist.

FREE ENTRY BUT PLEASE RSVP USING THE FROM AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE

‘PART WAKE-UP CALL, PART FINANCIAL THRILLER’ (SHAMI CHAKRABARTI) The Asset Class is an equal parts thrilling and enraging work of vital
financial journalism, lifting the lid on the relentlessly destructive force of private equity. We are thrilled to welcome the book’s author Hettie O’Brien to Housmans to be interviewed about the book by celebrated journalist Dan Hancox.
A thrilling, eye-opening investigation into private equity, a secretive wing of the finance industry that is so relentlessly destructive, it could have been created to undermine our way of life. You don’t know their names, but they own the house you rent. They own your hospitals, nurseries and care homes, the media you consume and the companies you work for. They even own the tools your union uses to fight back. Business is a contest – and they say their people are built to win. But when does competition become a struggle to the death? For decades, private equity firms have infiltrated every corner of modern life. Wielding debt as a weapon, they push vital services into crisis. Their cover story: that this is merely the ‘creative destruction’ essential to growth. Old-school capitalists say they’re dismantling everything that made our economies work.

In The Asset Class, reporter Hettie O’Brien penetrates a hidden empire of billion-dollar deals and covert financial warfare. From Copenhagen to San Francisco, Barcelona to the Yorkshire Dales, she follows the money, the ideological roots and the trail of destruction. What she finds is chilling: private equity isn’t just reshaping the economy – it’s selling out the foundations of Western society. The new owners think they can hide in the shadows. But the owned are fighting back.

Hettie will be interviewed by Dan Hancox, Guardian journalist and author of Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (Verso, 2024). They will talk about the book for about 45 minutes followed by a q&a.

To avoid disappointment, please do book a ticket ahead of the event.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00

We are profoundly honored to be hosting the paperback launch for a memoir by one the world’s greatest living artists, the sculptor Liliane Lijn, who will be joined in conversation by leading art writer Jennifer Higgie.
Liliane Lijn is an artist who needs little introduction. Her stirring, often ostentatious and always poetic works are dotted throughout the British urban landscape, and overseas. Regular visitors to Housmans will have no doubt seen her recent piece Temenos just up the road from us, near Granary Square.

We will host Liliane May 2nd to launch the paperback edition of her brilliant bildungsroman Liquid Reflections. The book begins in 1958 with the talented and fearless Liliane Lijn leaving her family home and moving to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution – peopled and controlled almost entirely by men. In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists: ‘There never have been.’

Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure – years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother. And she sought – and found – radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her.

Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age: a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman.

‘I wrote LIQUID REFLECTIONS because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It’s the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity…’
— Liliane Lijn

Liliane will be conversation with the art writer Jennifer Higgie, author of numerous books, her most recent being The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit World, the first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world.

This is going to be an extremely special event and we are delighted to be hosting it. Please do book a ticket in advance to avoid disappointment on the night.

Liliane and Jennifer will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by an open discussion with the audience. Doors will open at 6:45, with the event starting around 7.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

Join for a discussion of the journal of Kurdish revolutionary, Ali Poyraz. He spent twenty-one years and four months in Turkish prisons. He was born in 1962 in Bozüyük, an Alevi village in the Gürün district of Sivas. According to Yeni Özgür Politika, his political consciousness was shaped by his older brother, Hüseyin Poyraz (also known as Rubar Dicle), a member of the PKK Central Committee. In 1981, Ali was captured by Turkish authorities in a rural area of Pazarcık while serving as a PKK cadre. Tried by a military court, he was sentenced to death. Although the Turkish Supreme Court upheld the sentence, it was later commuted to twenty-one years and four months of imprisonment following the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey under Prime Minister Turgut Özal.

Ali’s journal records his thoughts and observations, providing invaluable insight into life inside Turkish prisons, including the organisation, morale, and activities of political prisoners. His journal is a mine of information that lends itself to much probing and understanding of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK over the past 45 years. This book is published for scholarly purposes, following the recent disbandment of the PKK as an armed force, and the changing political landscape in Turkey today.

We will discuss this powerful and important book, followed by a wider discussion of political imprisonment more generally.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.

NEW PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES: CHRISTINE DONOVAN & TOM VAGUE IN CONVERSATION
Join us for a conversation between two of the most brilliant writers of psychogeography working the country at the moment as they talk about their recent published works. Christine Donovan’s novel Dériveville explores the long term influence of the Situationist International. Setin 1981 in Paris it tells the story of English literary sensation Julia as she finds herself writing a screenplay with legendary nouvelle vague film director Lenica. The hedonism of the Cannes Film Festival, the drug-fueled excitement of Les Bains Douche and the tentative writing of a second novel take Julia on a psychogeographical journey Paris.

Joining Christine in conversation we welcome back to Housmans the living legend Tom Vague, who has recently published a two part book: Getting It Straight in Notting Hill Gate. From the Palaeolithic age to the drug and sex fuelled psychedelia of the 60s and 70s to the glum post-gentfrified catatonia of the 2020s this work project is an exhaustive psychogeographical autoposy on Notting Hill; as well as a proposed revival.

‘Vague presents this almost as the autobiography of Notting Hill with him as the inspired mouthpiece, his own biography mixed with that of the subject. He is the place’ writes Cryptoforestry.

Tom and Christine will talk for around 45 minutes to an hour, followed by a q&a.

As always, tickets are priced on a sliding scale. If you are unable to pay for a ticket please do not hesitate to contact us at shop@housmans.com, and a free ticket will be made available.

If you choose ‘book +entry’ your copies of the book will be available to collect on the evening. If you would like to collect it earlier, or arrange for delivery, please contact us (postage is £2.95). Telephone 020 7837 4473 or email shop@housmans.com.

Doors Open at 6:45pm, Event Starts 7:00.