The Southbank Centre proudly presents its latest Literature and Spoken Word season, running from November 2025 to February 2026 — a season of landmark cultural moments designed to celebrate every form of creativity and ensure inclusive access for all. From world-class literary awards to transformative performances and conversations, the programme champions the voices that challenge, inspire and expand what is possible.
As part of the Southbank Centre’s commitment to accessibility and inclusion, every event is built around the belief that creativity flourishes through diversity — of story, identity, and experience.
Disabled visitors and artists are central to this season’s vision, with wheelchair access, BSL interpretation, captioning (STT) and comprehensive access support available across venues.
This year’s programme features a powerful line-up of literary and cultural events — from The Booker Prize and TS Eliot Prize Readings to Salman Rushdie’s long-awaited return, Joelle Taylor’s groundbreaking new poetry, and performances by Sheku and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason — alongside Out-Spoken, The Orwell Lecture, and Letters to the Future, celebrating art’s power to connect, challenge and transform.
From global literary icons to emerging poets and storytellers, this season embodies the spirit of inclusive creativity — ensuring that every voice, every audience member and every access need is valued.
Southbank Centre’s Upcoming Literature and Spoken Word Programme Key Events
The Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist Readings – Sunday 9th November 2025, 8pm, Royal Festival Hall, Tickets from £20, For ages 16+, STT & BSL
Meet the six authors up for this year’s Booker Prize, as they read from and discuss their shortlisted books with novelist Sara Collins.
The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world, and published in the UK and/or Ireland. It has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades.
On the eve of the Booker Prize ceremony, hear from the six shortlisted authors in the running for this year’s £50,000 prize at this popular annual event.
The six shortlisted nominees are:
- Flashlight by Susan Choi – A multigenerational saga moving between post-war Japan, Korea and the United States, exploring identity, belonging, and the lingering effects of disappearance.
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai – A sweeping love story following two young Indians across continents as they navigate culture, ambition and the loneliness of migration.
- Audition by Katie Kitamura – A psychologically intense novel about an actress confronted by a young man who may be her son, delving into memory, self-deception and emotional disintegration. (Contains strong mental-health themes around identity loss and psychological collapse.)
- The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits – A road-trip narrative about a middle-aged academic whose marriage and sense of self begin to unravel, exploring mid-life crisis and disconnection.
- The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller – Set during the harsh winter of 1962–63 in rural England, it portrays two neighbouring couples whose inner turmoil is shaped by secrecy, grief and the frozen landscape. (Touches on mental-health and disability themes, with references to institutions and a school for the blind.)
- Flesh by David Szalay – A cross-continental story tracing a man’s journey from adolescence to middle age, reflecting on fate, desire and the passage of time.
Book tickets: The Booker Prize 2025 Shortlist Readings
Joelle Taylor: Maryville – Sunday 9th November 2025, 8pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tickets from £15, For ages 16+
Writer, Joelle Taylor, unveils her new poetry collection, a searing, poetic excavation of 50 years of lesbian counter-culture, with a staged reading hosted by Travis Alabanza.
Following on from her TS Eliot Prize-winning collection C+Nto & Othered Poems, Joelle’s Maryville charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history, tracing the culture, clubs and resistance that shaped their world.
With a vividly sketched cast of characters, the Maryville butch bar becomes a lens through which to consider the underground histories of queer London. The violence and pain of oppression and the beauty and intimacy of community are rendered in awe-inspiring high definition.
This event is the premiere performance of a staged reading by Joelle Taylor, directed by acclaimed writer and director Neil Bartlett, with visuals from artist and filmmaker Sweatmother. It is hosted by writer, performer and theatre‐maker Travis Alabanza, who joins Taylor for an on-stage Q&A.
Maryville explores the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke identity and the queer underground.
Book tickets: Joelle Taylor: Maryville
An Evening with Sheku and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason – Tuesday 25th November 2025, 7.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tickets from £20, For ages 16+, STT
Celebrate the publication of two powerful and inspiring books by members of Britain’s most musical family in a discussion chaired by Bernardine Evaristo.
In her new book To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason presents an impassioned defence of Black excellence in the arts.
Through the experiences of her extraordinarily gifted family, she reveals profound and candid insights about what it means – and how it feels – to grow up as a young Black artist in these turbulent times, and searches for a powerful and hopeful way forward.
The transformative power of music is at the centre of everything cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason does. But how was it that someone like him – a person of colour from a state school in Nottingham – rose to the upper echelons of the classical music world? In The Power of Music, he reflects on the obstacles he had to overcome, and which a young person might follow in his footsteps today.
Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason is a former lecturer at Birmingham University and the mother of seven children.
Sheku Kanneh-Mason shot to fame as the winner of the 2016 BBC Young Musician competition, the first Black musician to win the award since its launch in 1978. In the Queen’s 2020 New Year’s Honours, he was awarded an MBE for his services to music.
Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books. Her prizes include the Booker Prize 2019 and the one-off Women’s Prize Outstanding Contribution Award 2025.
Presented in association with the Royal Society of Literature.
Book tickets: An Evening with Sheku and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason
Salman Rushdie: The Eleventh Hour – Tuesday 25th November 2025, 7.30pm, Royal Festival Hall, Tickets from £20, For ages 16+, STT & BSL
The Booker Prize-winning author, Salman Rushdie, returns to the stage to celebrate the publication of his dazzling short story collection, in conversation with Mishal Husain.
If old age was thought of as an evening, ending in midnight oblivion, they were well into the eleventh hour.
Two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity. Revisiting the Bombay neighbourhood of Midnight’s Children, a magical musician is unhappily married to a multibillionaire. In an English university college, an undead academic asks a lonely student to avenge his former tormentor.
These five dazzling works of fiction move between the three countries that Salman Rushdie has called home – India, England and America – and explore what it means to approach the eleventh hour of life. They are the reckoning with mortality that we all must one day make, and speak deeply to what the author has come from and through.
Do we accommodate ourselves to death, or rail against it? How can we bid farewell to the places that we have made home? How do we achieve fulfilment with our lives if we don’t know the end of our own stories?
The Eleventh Hour ponders life and death, legacy and identity with the penetrating insight and boundless imagination that have made Salman Rushdie one of the most celebrated writers of our time.
Book tickets: Salman Rushdie: The Eleventh Hour
Out-Spoken – Multiple Dates, Purcell Room, Tickets from £15, For ages 16+, STT
Come along to a captivating evening of poetry and music hosted by poet and author Joelle Taylor, featuring emerging and internationally acclaimed artists.
Out-Spoken is the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night, bringing the hottest UK and international poets to perform alongside world-class musicians every month.
Each monthly gig is hosted by TS Eliot, and Polari Prize-winning poet Joelle Taylor, with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield spinning the best in reggae, soul and R&B throughout the evening.
Presented in association with Out-Spoken, there are two occasions during this winter season for you to enjoy this creative event:
- Thursday 27th November 2025 at 7:45pm
- Thursday 15th January 2026 at 7:45pm
Book tickets: Out-Spoken
The Orwell Lecture 2025 – Thursday 4th December 2025, 7.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tickets from £20, For ages 16+, STT
Given annually in memory of the author, essayist and journalist George Orwell, this event shines a light on brave writing.
The lecture has attracted many notable speakers over the years, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Bill Browder. Speakers are tasked with discussing ‘any topic Orwell might have been interested in’.
The Orwell Foundation is a charity which shares George Orwell’s vision of a decent society where thought is free, truth is valued, and brave writing is celebrated. The lecture is generously sponsored by Richard Blair, George Orwell’s son and Founding Patron of The Orwell Foundation.
The speaker for The Orwell Lecture 2025 will be announced in due course.
Book tickets: The Orwell Lecture 2025
TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings – Sunday 18th January 2026, 7pm, Royal Festival Hall, Tickets from £15, For ages 16+, STT & BSL
Hear the best new poetry coming out of the UK and Ireland, read by the ten shortlisted poets for this year’s prize, in an event hosted by poet Ian McMillan.
The TS Eliot Prize is the world’s most prestigious prize for poetry. Past winners include internationally renowned poets with established reputations, as well as newly emerging writers helping to reshape the art form.
This year, the shortlist has been chosen by judges Michael Hofmann (Chair), Patience Agbabi and Niall Campbell.
The shortlist for this year’s prize features:
- Gillian Allnut, Lode (Bloodaxe Books)
- Isabelle Baafi, Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber)
- Catherine-Esther Cowie, Heirloom (Carcanet Press)
- Paul Farley, When it Rained for a Million Years (Picador Poetry)
- Vona Groarke, Infinity Pool (Gallery Press)
- Sarah Howe, Foretokens (Chatto Poetry)
- Nick Makoha, The New Carthaginians (Penguin Press)
- Tom Paulin, Namanlagh (Faber & Faber)
- Natalie Shapero, Stay Dead (Out-Spoken Press)
- Karen Solie, Wellwater (Picador Poetry)
These collections focus on many themes, including mental health, trauma, anxiety and identity.
The TS Eliot Prize is among the world’s most celebrated awards. Inaugurated in 1993 to celebrate the Poetry Book Society’s 40th birthday and to honour its founding poet, the Prize is now awarded by the TS Eliot Foundation.
Book tickets: TS Eliot Prize Shortlist Readings
Letters to the Future – Saturday 7th February 2026, 7.30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tickets from £20, For ages 16+, STT
Weaving together music and ideas for a heightened concert experience, this event invites audiences to reflect on legacy, climate and the transformative role of art.
‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley. This belief that artists can shape our destiny is at the heart of Letters to the Future.
The show features a rotating cast of celebrated writers and musicians presenting original songs and spoken letters addressed to you and our collective future.
The evening unfolds as a collective act of time travel – a living archive in song and story.
Book tickets: Letters to the Future
You can view details of all events happening from November 2025 to February 2026 by visiting the Southbank Centre event page.
Accessibility information
Accessibility information, including wheelchair access, concession tickets, queuing exemptions, captions, BSL and other facilities, can be found on the Southbank Centre Access page.
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