UPCOMING EVENTS
Welcome to our events page.
Unless stated otherwise, all events occur in
Desperate Literature, Calle de la Cava Baja 8, Madrid,
and are not ticketed!
The Desperate Literature
Prize Salon:
Celebrating the Shortlist
Fri 21st November
20h
‘Generous, soulful distillations. A tasting flight of prosaic kerosene. Each story ignited a flare in a forsaken corner of my mind. I can’t wait to experience more from these voices.’
—Henry Hoke
We celebrate one of our most exciting selections yet! Our 2025 shortlist covers a spectrum of experimental and boundary pushing fiction.
From a Faulknerian river story to the lushest, queerest body horror — from cross-country feminist malaise to cross-border love — prophets, mothers, labourers — a tedious apocalypse, post-capitalist hope — these eleven stories are brimming with magic, longing, and humour.
Join us for an evening of readings and then some drinks!
Rafael Carvajal
New Voices:
en evening of poetry
(evento bilingüe)
Fri 28th November
20h
Speaking unedited verse in a new voice, in tongues, like the devils of the new testament.
Rafael Carvajal nace en Málaga en 1964. En 1976 emigra a Estados Unidos donde publica: Deep enough to dive in, Dogs and the flowers chey piss on y Bucketful of wing nuts a finales de los 80 con Drew Blood Productions Limited. También se involucra con el movimiento Open Mike, recitando en ciudades como Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Boston y más. En 1995 retorna a España instalándose en el madrileño barrio de Lavapiés donde toma contacto con el ambiente poético de Madrid y participa en diferentes recitales. Ha publicado, Mi psicóloga me dice que se jubila, colección hecho en Lavapiés, Amargord, Misántropo con buen corazón con L.U.P.I. ediciones, El cantón libre y ácrata de Lavapiés – Salvoconducto 95 y ,ahora, 25 odas y un poema interminable con Inflamavle ediciones que también produjo el documental sobre su vida y obra, Yo maté a Ralph Greene, disponible en Filmin. Desde 2022 ha colaborado con la compañía Teatro de los Invisibles en la obra Contención mecánica sobre las práctica psiquiátrica de atar a pacientes a la cama. En la obra hace de sí mismo como loco, activista y poeta.
Creative Writing Workshop
with Geneviève Genicot
FIRST SESSION
Dec 6th
14h – 17h
Looking for a fresh spark for your writing? Let contemporary Francophone authors open new doors to your imagination.
Each session introduces a new writer — their world, their style, their technique — and a selected text, provided with an English translation. From there, you’ll be guided through creative prompts and gentle feedback designed to help you grow in your writing.
Geneviève Eva Genicot is a Belgian poet, fiction writer, and editor, and has been leading writing workshops for a decade.
Each session: €23
Including a €3 discount on any book purchased on the day.
Limited spots.
To sign up, contact: genevieve.genicot@gmail.com
Shadow Ticket
A Book Club
with Elizabeth Duval, Sara Barquinero
y Alfredo Suárez
Sat 20th Dec
12h
In English y Español
15 places available.
PLEASE BOOK HERE
It is important to have read the book before coming.
We offer a 10% discount on copies to anybody attending!
PAST EVENTS
Joanna Walsh
Amateurs!
How We Built Internet Culture
and Why It Matters
Monday 10th November
20h
“Amateurs! is a eulogy and a manifesto for the internet revolution that came and went before our eyes, on our screens, beneath our fingertips: the revolution of the amateur.”
Helena Aeberli, Los Angeles Review of Books
The story of how you created internet culture and why it matters
Since the nineties, platforms have invited users to create in return for connection. From blogs to vlogs, tweets to memes: for the first time in history, making art became the fundamental form of communication.
What started as fun soon became currency, something vital to finding friends, work, and love. Then, as ‘meatspace’ job security eroded, online creativity became work itself. Now an internet presence is no longer optional, platforms increasingly charge users. Whatever it is we’re creating online, it isn’t amateur anymore. But is it art?
In this scintillating philosophical history of the internet, Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online, examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.
Joanna Walsh is a multidisciplinary writer for print, digital and performance. The author of twelve books (several co-written with DIY AIs that she coded), her publishers include Semiotext(e), Bloomsbury and Verso. She is the creator of the digital narratives, seed-story.com and miss-communication.ie. Her work has been performed/exhibited at venues including IMMA, the ICA, BETA Festival Dublin, and Sample Studios Cork. She founded and directed the online activist projects @read_women (2014-18), and @noentry_arts (2019_2024). She was the 2020 Markievicz Awardee for Literature, the 2017 UK Arts Foundation fellow for literature; an Anthony Burgess Centenary Writer Fellow at the University of Manchester and a 2024 DAAD Artists in Berlin awardee (refused in solidarity with the Palestine).
Lauren Francis-Sharma
Casualties of Truth
Friday 14th November
20h
“I COULD NOT PUT THIS BOOK DOWN”
– Xochitl Gonzalez
“Casualties of Truth is a page-turner so engrossing that you never get distracted by the exceptional grace of its storytelling. Tense yet character-driven, Lauren Francis-Sharma has created a brilliant rumination on how we use the malleable clay of memory to sculpt our understanding of ourselves and the world.”
—Mat Johnson, author of Pym and Invisible Things
From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed ‘Til the Well Runs Dry, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, D.C., and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lauren Francis-Sharma, a Pushcart nominated writer, is author of Book of the Little Axe, a 2020 finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. Her critically acclaimed novel, ‘Til the Well Runs Dry was awarded the Honor Fiction Prize by the Black Caucus of the ALA. Her third novel, Casualties of Truth, a finalist for the 2025 Caricon Prize, was inspired by her time at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Amnesty Hearings. Lauren wrote the foreword to the latest edition of Cry, the Beloved Country, serves as Award Chair for the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Fatema Abdoolcarim
Tremble
an evening of poetry
Monday 17th November
20h
‘Tremble is a gift of profound proportions, conveying with her signature brilliant and caring gaze the variable inner and outer textures of life.’
– Gabrielle Bates
Tremble, Fatema Abdoolcarim’s debut collection of poems, is an intimate and involving sequence on fertility and faith. A memoir in verse, these poems relate encounters with the animal other, the uncertain, but always echoing the tender rituals of family, food, prayer. Abdoolcarim thinks through what it means to care – and to mother – at a time where atrocity makes those systems of loving seem out of reach. Tremble traces the sensual and unknown spaces of desire, creating a hopeful lyric in spaces of private and global loss.
Fatema Abdoolcarim was born and raised in Hong Kong to a Peshawari Pakistani mother and a Gujarati Indian father, and tells stories shaped by the textures of her upbringing and community. Trained in photography and fine arts in the US, she taught herself filmmaking with a DSLR. Her debut short documentary Heidi (Locarno, 2016) and her narrative short Sweet Lime (ZINEBI’65, 2023) have screened internationally. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester, where her research explored female desire in Islamic miniature painting. Her debut poetry collection, Tremble (Monitor Books), is out now. She is currently developing her first feature film, Hum, and a collaborative cookbook with poet Rebecca Hurst, inspired by the art of Leonora Carrington.