Check back soon to see our upcoming events!
Past Events
25/11/21, 7pm
Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love – Huma Qureshi
Huma Qureshi in conversation with Natasha Lunn
Join us for an evening with award-winning writer Huma Qureshi in conversation with Natasha Lunn, to mark the publication of Huma’s exquisite and moving debut short story collection, Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love.
Each story deals with individual relationships, exploring their intricacies and nuances with tenderness. A daughter asks her mother to shut up, only to shut her up for good; an exhausted wife walks away from the husband who doesn’t understand her; on holiday, lovers no longer understand each other away from home. Stories of mothers and daughters, children lost, unborn, grown up, grown apart, and the dissonance between lovers – Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love exposes the parts of ourselves we rarely reveal. Intertwined within this exquisite collection are themes of loneliness, secrets, family, and displacement, as well as the desire to belong to someone or to some place, and a yearning for love.
Huma Qureshi is an award-winning writer, and a former Observer and Guardian reporter. Her memoir How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures was published in January 2021 by Elliott & Thompson, to critical acclaim, chosen by Stylist as one of 2021’s best non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2020 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. She is now writing her first novel, an enchanting story about family, belonging and identity. She lives in London.
Huma will be in conversation with Natasha Lunn. Natasha is the features director at RED magazine and the creator of a popular and acclaimed bimonthly email newsletter, Conversations on Love. She is also the author of the Conversations on Love book. After years of interviewing people about their relationships, Natasha learnt that questions about love are often rooted in three bigger ones: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?
3/11/21, 7pm
2021 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize Anthology
Prize ceremony and launch
Our first event since the pandemic was to launch the 2021 edition of our Short Story Prize Anthology. It was a real joy to have an in-person audience back in the shop and to feel the excitement surrounding this year’s book.
Huge congratulations to Aoife Inman, WINNER of the 2021 Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize – and to runners up Danielle Vrublevskis and Katherine Gutierrez!
This year’s anthology is available to buy here.
Short Story Prize 2020
In lieu of our Short Story Prize book launch and prize giving event in 2020, we asked our six short listed writers to record readings for us. You can watch them here:
Chameleon – Rea Dennhardt
Fix – K. Lockwood Jefford
No Phones at the Dinner Table – Jack Houston
Small Differences – Huma Qureshi
To Those Born Later – Kieran Toms
The Closed Door – Alice Haworth-Booth
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