UPCOMING EVENTS

Welcome to our events page.

Unless stated otherwise, all events occur in
Desperate Literature, Calle Campomanes 13, Madrid,
and are not ticketed!

FRIDAY JULY 26
20h00

SAD GIRL NOVEL
with Pip Finkemeyer
interviewed by Emily Westmoreland

Pip Finkemeyer is in the EU for the Sad Girl Summer presentation of her first novel. Pip will be interviewed by bookseller, editor and Desperate Literature Prize Judge, Emily Westmoreland.

About the novel:

Kim is becoming a writer, and is determined to write a bestseller. She’s been convinced of this idea by Matthew, an American literary agent who is as emotionally unavailable as he is handsome (very). Kim lives in her own carefully constructed reality, which her imagination is constantly pumping full of hot air. As she attempts to buoy herself using other people for external motivation, they poke holes in her fantasies, leading her to wonder if she’s going to come crashing down or somehow stay afloat.

Meanwhile, Bel is becoming a mother, and gives birth, certain it will fulfil her in ways her career does not seem to. Kim and Bel support and deceive each other as only the best of friends can.

In the face of probable failure, how do we convince ourselves to try and become something anyway? And how do we live with the choices we make?

About Pip:

Pip Finkemeyer’s fiction has been listed for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, the Disquiet Literary Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She co-founded the Berlin-based zine Nothing To See Here, and completed a Masters in Publishing and Editing at RMIT. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne and Sad Girl Novel is her first novel.

About Emily:

Emily Westmoreland is a bookseller and programmer from Australia. She runs Dinner Party Press, is the program director of the Williamstown Literary Festival, and has been involved with the Desperate Literature Prize since its inception. In 2023 she was the Penguin Random House Young Bookseller of the Year.

SAY AUGUST 3
20h00

Why Are You Shouting?
with James Womack

One of our favourite poets is back in town for one night only and in Desperate Literature to read from his new collection!

Why Are You Shouting?, James Womack’s fourth Carcanet collection, thinks about two things in particular: our struggle as individuals to find connections between ourselves, with friends, family and lovers, and the efforts we make as groups to connect to the environment we live and die in. Written in the shadow of the climate crisis and the pandemic years, the poems set out to find points of hope and solidarity, against a common backdrop of disruption and collapse to which we are often wilfully blind.

Alongside these concerns runs a narrative of personal blindness and self-enchantment, a willingness to allow oneself to be misled in order to have a quiet life. If the collection’s title suggests that raising one’s voice is the readiest way to reach other people, the poems themselves dare to offer quieter solutions, too: there is space for humour and kindness, even a degree of positive thinking about the state the world is in.

The ghost of Cassandra, the Trojan princess given the gift of prophecy but condemned to have no one believe her words, haunts the collection: her life is a warning, but also an antidote to willed ignorance.

‘The God of whom I speak is dead.
I did my makeup in a disco ball.
I looked at the whole magnificent
creation of the Lord, and asked,
sadly, “Is it cake?”‘