An Evening with Jenny Colgan
Part of First Date Festival 2023
(Sun 25 June: 5.30pm)
We are delighted to get to host the launch of The Summer Skies, the new book by our festival patron Sunday Times bestseller Jenny Colgan with event chair Amna Saleem.
Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous bestselling novels for adults, including Meet Me at the Cupcake Café and Little Beach Street Bakery. When Neil the puffin from Little Beach Street Bakery caught her readers’ attention, Jenny knew she needed a story of his own – and so the idea for Polly and the Puffin was born. Jenny is married with three children and lives in Scotland. For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter: @jennycolgan.
Amna Saleem is a Scottish Pakistani screenwriter with a BBC Radio Four sitcom in its second season and several original TV projects in development. She has been published in two best selling anthologies It's Not About The Burqa and Who's Loving You. Before abandoning journalism for slightly healthier pastures, Amna wrote for publications such as The Guardian, BBC, GQ, New Statesmen and HuffPost amongst others.
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‘Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom’ - adrienne maree brown
Romance writing has long shown that the personal is definitely political. The genre has hosted important conversations on consent, and represents a huge diversity of stories which are still missing from mainstream fiction - joy and pleasure for women, queer people, people of colour, fat people, disabled people, and more. Too often it’s seen as a frivolous genre - but our pleasure is not frivolous! Our pleasure is radical.
At Scotland’s inaugural romance festival FIRST DATE, we'll be serving up a dazzling variety of romance books, have events discussing genre boundaries, subversive politics, queer joy, and feminist pleasure, and an all-day marketplace to find your next (or maybe your first?) romance read. The three events are also available virtually.
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First Date is a collaboration between Lighthouse Bookshop - Edinburgh's radical bookshop - and the Scottish Storytelling Centre.
Tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a suggested amount of £5. Please select Full Price for £5 or PWYC use the arrows to select your desired amount. As part of our collaboration with Lighthouse Books we are asking all our First Date audiences to wear a mask at these events so that we can keep vulnerable guests and authors as safe as possible. There will be spare masks available from Reception on the day
