Events in libraries
Learn to Make Friends with Yourself
Would you like to discover how to change your life for the better? Author and coach, Sue Plumtree, is running an eyeopening workshop that can transform your life.
Sue’s background encompassed HR management, running her own training business in communication skills and lecturing young HR professionals at the Westminster Business School. She spent the next eight years working at the Institute of Directors as Client Development Executive before leaving to follow her calling. Sue also led a series of interactive talks called “Let’s Talk About…” in Richmond, Surrey where she lives. She’s now a coach/mentor, writer and speaker and has recently published her second book “Dancing with the Mask”.
Saturday 6 March 10.30am - 1.00pm East Sheen Library
Workshop places cost £5.00 each and are strictly limited, please contact the library or use our online booking.
What Made Modern Twickenham
Join us for a talk with Michael Lee based on his book "The Making of Modern Twickenham". A local history expert, Michael is also the chairman of the Richmond and Twickenham Historical Association.
Saturday 6 March 3pm Twickenham Library
Tickets £1 including refreshments. To book please contact the library or use our online booking.
Meet The Author - Margaret Leroy
Margaret Leroy author of The Perfect Mother
"Margaret Leroy writes with candour and intelligence, capturing the menace of suddenly finding that the world may not be all as you thought it.’ – Helen Dunmore
Saturday 6 March 3pm Castelnau Library
This is a free event. Refreshments will be served.
Booking is essential: please use our online booking facility, ring 020 8748 3837 or ask at your local library.
Meet The Author - Alessandro Gallenzi
Local author Alessandro Gallenzi is a literary publisher with almost ten years of experience, a translator, a poet, a playwright and a novelist. His collection of poetry, A Modern Bestiary – Ars Poetastrica, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim. He lives in Richmond with his wife and two children.
A portrait of the contemporary obsession with success, celebrity and fame.
Jim Talbot, a writer with a dozen unpublished novels under his belt, has been roundly rejected by virtually every agent and publisher in the land, and is willing to go to extreme lengths to make his dream of literary stardom come true. Charles Randall, the eccentric founder of Tetragon Press, a small independent publisher that has survived for thirty years in a fierce publishing environment, is about to be brutally sacked by a newly appointed business consultant. Inevitably, and calamitously, Charles and Jim’s paths are about to collide. A novel of intrigue, deceit and sheer desperation, Bestseller is a caustic portrait of contemporary culture and of Britain’s obsession with fame, success and becoming the next J.K. Rowling.
Thursday 11 March 11am Ham Library
This is a free event, all welcome. Refreshments will be served. Places are limited so please book via your local library, or book online.
Meet The Author - Suzanne Bugler
Join us for a series of talks with local author Suzanne Bugler about her stunning adult debut This Perfect World.
Suzanne Bugler lives in South-West London with her husband and two sons. She has also written two novels for young adults: Staring up at the Sun and Meet Me at the Boathouse.
Friday 5 March 3pm East Sheen Library
Thursday 18 March 1pm Ham Library
Thursday 25 March 6.30pm Richmond Library
Tuesday 6 April 3pm Castelnau Library
Wednesday 28 April 6.30pm Whitton Library
This is a free event. All welcome. Refreshments will be served.
Places are limited so please book via your local library, ring 020 8912 0653 or book online
Meet The Author - Jeffrey Lewis
Adam the King forms a part of Jeffrey Lewis’s Meritocracy Quartet, a sequence of four books that span four decades of American history. Echoing F Scott Fitzgerald, Lewis examines the inner world of the WASP aristocracy: ‘their studied vagueness, their heartiness, the aloofness that cannot be copied.’ (Los Angeles Times). Set in the money-mad ‘90s, Adam the King depicts the fallout from deepening class and social divisions in a voice that is ‘pitch-perfect… quirky, rueful and wise’ (Kirkus Reviews). The novel won the Independent Publishers Gold Medal for Literary Fiction in 2009, as well as the ForeWord Magazine Silver Award for Fiction in 2008. Lewis has received a string of other awards for his writing, including the Independent Publishers Award for General Fiction for his first novel in the Meritocracy Quartet, Meritocracy: A Love Story in 2004, and two Emmys and the Writer’s Guild Award for his work as a writer and producer on Hill Street Blues.
Jeffrey Lewis was born in New York, educated at Yale and now lives in Los Angeles and Castine, Maine. Adam the King is his fourth novel, following Meritocracy: A Love Story, The Conference of the Birds, and Theme Song for an Old Show.
Wednesday 24 March - 6.30pm Twickenham Library
This is a free event. All welcome. Refreshments will be served.
Places are limited so please book via your local library, ring 020 8892 8091 or book online
Dry Felt Making
Free Informal Adult Learning Workshop by Orleans House Gallery
Now you can learn the fascinating art of felt making with artist Laura Service and create your own stunning piece!
This workshop is suitable for absolute beginners who want to understand the process of turning wool into felt. Find out where to source more materials to develop your talent and creativity. No experience needed.
Wednesday 24 March 1pm-3pm Twickenham Library
This is free event. Adults welcome
Places are limited so please book via your local library, or use our Online Booking
Meet The Author - R.J. Ellory
R.J. Ellory has been called "one of crime fiction's new stars" by the Sunday Telegraph. He began his first novel in 1987 and did not stop until 1993. During this time he completed twenty-two novels, most of them in longhand, and accumulated several hundred polite and complimentary rejection letters.
Roger stopped writing out of sheer frustration and did not start again for eight years. Now he is the author of seven previous novels including the bestselling A Quiet Belief in Angels, which was a Richard & Judy Book Club selection in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Barry Award, the 813 Trophy, the Quebec Booksellers’ Prize and was winner of the Nouvel Observateur Crime Fiction Prize. His work has been translated into twenty-three languages.
Thursday 27 May - 7pm Hampton Library
Tickets: £2.50 Refreshments included. Booking is essential. Please book via your local library, ring 020 8979 5110 or book online.
Signed books will be available to purchase.
Effie From Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’s Muse - A Victorian Scandal
The wife who repelled Ruskin, sought an annulment from their marriage and then became the much painted wife of Millais… this is the true story of Euphemia Chalmers Ruskin, also known as Effie.
A talk with Merryn Williams who read English at Cambridge and obtained her doctorate for her work on Thomas Hardy. An English lecturer for the Open University for twenty years, she is now editor of The Interpreter’s House. She has published three volumes of poetry and was winner of the Second Light Network Poetry Competition 2003.
Thursday 10 June 6.30 – 7.30pm Richmond Library
This is a free event but places are limited so booking is essential.
Please book via your local library,ring 020 8940 0981 or Book Online. Refreshments will be served.
Wednesday 30 June 1pm to 2pm Teddington Library. This is a free event but places are limited so booking is essential. Please book via your local library, ring 020 8977 1284 or Book Online.
We regret that we cannot exchange, refund or transfer tickets unless the event in question has been cancelled or rescheduled.
Library mailing list
Join our library mailing list for regular updates and news of forthcoming events.
Children's events
For details of other library events for children and teens, please see the Young People's Library Service news and events page.
Storytime
All libraries hold a storytime for the under-5s once a week; see the Storytime page for details.
Tiny Teddies
Most libraries also hold monthly bounce and rhyme sessions for pre-school children, called Tiny Teddies. These sessions are great fun and include songs, rhyme and stories. All these activities are free of charge.