About this Event
Join award-winning authors Adam Farrer & Jenn Ashworth for an interactive workshop about the art of memoir writing.
Date: Saturday, 13 June
Time: 1pm-4.30pm, including a 30 minute break (followed by An Evening of Memoir at The Grove Bookshop, 5.30pm-7pm)
Venue: The Clarke Foley Community Hub, Cunliffe Road, Ilkley, LS29 9DZ
Tickets: £45 (includes free entry to An Evening of Memoir at The Grove Bookshop, which can be booked separately for £7)
Tickets can be purchased in the shop or here via Eventbrite.
The workshop:
Where do we come from? The answer is never simple; it's written in the faces of the people who shaped us, and in the streets, rooms, and landscapes we carry inside us long after we've left them behind.
In this one-day workshop, writers Adam Farrer and Jenn Ashworth invite you to explore the raw material of your own life. Whether you're putting pen to paper for the first time or looking for a way back into a story you've been circling for years, this is a space to begin.
Adam will guide you through the delicate, sometimes funny, sometimes fraught art of writing about people; the relatives, friends, and rivals who made us who we are. How do you do justice to someone real? How do you write about people who might one day read what you've written?
Jenn will take you into the places that live in memory: houses, neighbourhoods, weather, the built and natural worlds of the places that have formed us. The landscapes inside us are some of our richest material, and learning to write them opens doors we didn't know were there.
Our Guests
Adam Farrer is a writer, mentor and editor and currently works at the University of Salford, where he is the Writer in Residence for Peel Park. He has taught creative nonfiction and life writing at the University of Lancaster as well as extensively at retreats, literary festivals and prisons.His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Guardian, Metro, Hinterland and Test Signal (Bloomsbury/Dead Ink, 2021). Specialising in personal essays that use humour to tackle challenging subject matter, his writing has been praised by The TLS, The Mail on Sunday and Publishers Weekly. He is the author of two personal essay collections, Cold Fish Soup (Saraband, 2022), winner of the Northbound Book Award, and Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures (HarperNorth, 2025) and edits the creative nonfiction journal The Real Story.
Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied at Newnham College, Cambridge and the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. Before becoming a writer, she worked as a librarian in a Pr*son. Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. On the publication of her second, Cold Light (Sceptre, 2011) she was featured on the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the UK’s twelve best new writers. Her third novel The Friday Gospels (2013) and her fourth Fell (2016) are also published by Sceptre. Ashworth has also published short fiction and won an award for her blog, Every Day I Lie a Little. Her work has been compared to both Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith; all her novels to date have been set in the North West of England. In 2019 she published a memoir-in-essays about reading, writing and sickness called Notes Made While Falling which was a New Statesman Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. Her latest novel is Ghosted: A Love Story. She lives in Lancashire, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Professor of Writing at Lancaster University.
About Adam Farrer's Broken Biscuits:
Broken Biscuits vividly recounts Adam’s struggles to live up to masculine expectations, real or imagined. From the calamity of his first serious relationship to an obsession with Prince that sees everyone questioning his sexuality, and from the repercussions of his adult circumcision to his doubts about his ability to survive the apocalypse, this candid and personal collection of essays is astonishingly far-reaching and riotously funny.
Holding up a mirror to Adam’s own body image, his relationship with his family, his sense of self-worth and the mortifying experience of arriving at a teenage party wearing strawberry-patterned short shorts, this book is about growing up and trying to define yourself as a man but somehow always missing the mark.
Reviews:
'A lovely writer: supple, stylish and almost effortlessly witty.' (Daily Mail)
'Made me laugh out loud and then properly cry.’ (Jennie Godfrey)
About Jen Ashworth's The Parallel Path:
Burnt out and longing for an escape, Jenn Ashworth emerged from lockdown with a compulsive need to walk - and to walk away. Armed with little more than the knowledge imparted by a two-day orienteering course and a set of maps, she embarked on the most epic of English walks: Wainwright's Coast to Coast.
Guided not just by Wainwright's writing but also by daily letters from her friend Clive - facing an epic journey of his own - Jenn's pilgrimage soon becomes more than just walking: a chance to reconnect and excavate, to re-engage with the act of caring for others and for oneself.
But the walk's tricky terrain is not the only thing standing in Jenn's way. As days go by, her balance begins to fail her and the act of putting one foot in front the other becomes a new exercise in caution. When a vicious heatwave forces her to pause her expedition and gives her an opportunity to investigate the new limitations of her body, Jenn is confronted with a life-altering diagnosis - and a new path of self-discovery.
Reviews:
'Touching, thoughtful and frank - Jenn Ashworth is a wonderful writer.'
(David Nicholls, author of You Are Here)
'I've long loved Ashworth's uncanny fiction, and this memoir is filled with her characteristic understanding of the connections between the physical world and our interior lives. Wonderful for taking on a walk yourself.' (Financial Times)
'Like going on a long walk with an old friend: I loved it.' (Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Grove Bookshop, 10 The Grove, Ilkley, United Kingdom
GBP 45.00
