It’s Monday afternoon, and we’re looking back – bleary-eyed – at a packed weekend of events at Wolves Lit Fest. It’s fair to say we’ve a real sense of wonder about just how good it was once again. And alongside that, there’s a considerable amount of exhaustion – ideally, the pandemonialists would be writing this blog curled under their respective duvets, but the world isn’t like that, and we’ve been travelling the West Midlands/doing IT/slogging through admin since first thing this morning.
Anyway, them’s the breaks. Let’s talk about how good Lit Fest was! As always, there was oodles of stuff we never got the opportunity to see, but there was a fair amount we were closely involved in and chuffed to bits to put on. On Saturday, we curated the Fringe Room in the Arena Theatre: five Fringe shows performed to an appreciative audience, each of them pay-as-you-feel (with all the money going direct to the artist).
First up was Melanie Branton with her show The Full English. We brought this up to Wolves in the summer, as part of Midlands Fringe, but it’s so good we had to bring it back, and we’re very glad we did. Catch it if you can!
Rob Kemp should have been next, with his show Beatlesjuice, but he was unable to make it (get well soon, Rob!) so our very own Steve Pottinger stepped in with a debut performance of his show Sweat & Mugs & RocknRoll.
Emma slipped away to interview Kit de Waal in Wolverhampton’s Art Gallery, which meant she missed show number three – Cameroonian storyteller Charles Kouasseu, who soon had a packed theatre singing and dancing, despite the rain outside. Highly recommended.
Our fourth show was AngelaBra: diary of a bingo call girl which was a lot of fun, got everyone playing bingo, and we take our collective hats off to the audience members who lip-synced and danced to a disco classic in order to win their prize. You were ace!
And we closed with Still Raving in your 40s by Donald Jenkins, a full-on piece of physical theatre which took us into the heart of the lived experience of rave culture.
There was just time to grab a bite to eat before Stars of Slam, our annual poetry event in the Art Gallery which showcases the considerable talents of four slam-winning poets, and their incredible poetic voices. Stepping up to the mic this year were Clive Oseman, Charlotte Faulconbridge, Davina Songbird, and the winner of last year’s Wolves Lit Fest slam, David Braziel. And it was glorious!
We headed home, we got some sleep, we came back in bright and early on Sunday morning, and we spent the day curating the Writers’ Hub. This gives a platform to a host of local writers’ groups from across Wolverhampton, as well as groups from Walsall, Lichfield, and Stourbridge, and it’s a hugely important part of what the festival offers. Over the course of the day, we had almost 400 people come through the doors, to support friends, to listen, or to read their work.
Emma slipped away again, this time to give a sold-out reading from her latest collection Unsung (which is very very very very good) but was back in time to see new writing group Willenhall Writers share their work at the festival for the very first time. And if that isn’t part of what a literature festival should be doing, then we don’t know what is.
They closed the Writers’ Hub for 2026, we treated ourselves to a curry and an early night, and today is all about saying ‘thank you’ to the artists, audiences, and organisers who made this year’s festival such a success. It’s also about us recycling our blog titles because we’re tired, and hoping no-one notices. But we won’t mention that.
Wolves Lit Fest will be back in February 2027. Put the dates in your diary and we’ll see you there!
PPP
9th Feb 2026