Programme Overview 2022

Bradford Literature Festival 2022 PROGRAMME OVERVIEW 2022

Welcome back to Bradford Literature Festival (BLF), the North’s largest literature festival. With over 350 live events between 24 June and 3 July 2022, we will be welcoming visitors from near and far to explore words and discover worlds across the full spectrum of international literary themes led by a host of international talent. An unmissable festival on the cultural calendar, BLF features a Public Festival Programme for adults, a free Children and Families Programme (including Early Years events), a free Education Programme and a Creative Economic Conference. BLF incorporates panel discussions, lectures, debates, book signings, short talks, walking tours, film screenings, workshops, storytelling sessions, poetry, music, and theatre performances for children, young people and adults. Our programme takes place in venues around Bradford city centre, with some sitespecific events scheduled in locations such as Undercliffe Cemetery, the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Cartwright Hall. The 2022 festival makes its return to Bradford’s iconic City Park, which celebrates its ten-year anniversary this year. The outdoor venue is the home of BLF’s annual Literature Unlocked: Family Fun Days, featuring free themed performances, craft workshops and storytelling sessions, across the two weekends of the festival. The themed days this year will be Superhero Spectacular, Fantastical Fairy Tales, Myths, Mummies and Monsters and Magical Mayhem. Each year the festival focuses on its annual strands, which include Brontë Heritage, Hockney, Poetry, World Affairs and Politics, Gender Politics, Food, Sport and Faith and Ethics. We also select several anniversaries and themes to explore across the festival’s programme various genre strands which this year include Discovery of the Valley of the Kings, In Memory of Andalusia, 100-Year Anniversary of the Egypt Mandate & Transjordan Creation, The 75-Year Anniversary of Partition and the Platinum Jubilee. We invite you to take a journey of exploration into the written and spoken word to delve in and discover insights into the familiar and the unfamiliar, to join us in a celebration of literature and language. We look forward to seeing you at BLF 2022.