October 26, 2026 |
We hear it constantly: young people aren’t going out anymore. Clubs are struggling to sell tickets, pubs midweek are dead, twentysomethings are picking up weights over pints.
While there’s a sliver of truth to all that, the capital’s youth are finding new ways to get together, even if it doesn’t involve alcopops and sticky dancefloors. Throughout London, there has been a boom in the literary scene, with reading nights popping up across the city. No two are the same. There are poetry slams, pick-and-mix variety shows, trans healthcare fundraisers and basement shindigs where you can hear both smutty fanfics and queer theory over a couple of G&Ts. You never know, you might end up even copping off with a fellow words fan? What the following nights have in common is that you’re guaranteed to hear excellent pieces of writing from some of the capital’s most exciting scribes. Wise words all round.
Clockwise, from top left: Colton Karpman, Isaac Zamet, Dilara Koz, Emily Bauer and Katy Trame
NEW PAPERS
Anyone who’s been to a New Papers night knows they’re in for a right hoot. Led by a talented sevensome, it is first and foremost a magazine that collates fiction and poetry. With each issue – it’s currently on its sixth – the group head down to Haggerston’s Rose Lipman Building to stage a recital where the magazine’s contents are performed sequentially and in full. The group enlist artists, set designers, dramaturgs and musicians to bring the stories to life, whether it’s through shadow puppetry or school play-style performances, with medieval costumes and all.
Why did you start New Papers?
New Papers 1 was published in January 2025. From our perspective, the presentation of literature is not neutral with respect to the content. In other words, the way a piece is presented changes its meaning. Therefore, the stage design aspect constitutes a large-scale and spatial theatrical intervention that communicates new meaning to the work it showcases. It is a fun and co-ordinatively challenging production effort.
What inspired you when making it?
Shakespeare, the Elgin Marbles, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, motte-and-bailey castles
What sort of stories will we hear on the night?
Stories are inherently about change. A protagonist is whisked away into some new world, corporeal or conjectured, and returns as a new person. The reader, too, is therefore thrown imaginatively into a new world. To this point – the stories you will hear are ones which will effect deep and meaningful change in you. Not all of this content will be enjoyable, but as we have tried to stress, enjoyable content was never the point.
Why should we come to the next one?
Because the pieces we publish contain much more than what we print. They need to be experienced, not from beyond the parapets of the Rose Lipman Building, where we host all of our recitals, but up close and personal. We suggest that you draw in your piquets [wooden stakes] and let us take care of you.
What sort of people are coming?
The only way I’d be able to describe this is as a family unit. There is little demographic uniformity. There are experts and laypeople, the healthy and the maladjusted, the old and the young. Ultimately, it is a gang of rogues, but it is our family.
Taken from 10 Men Issue 64 – FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE – out NOW. Order your copy here.
Photography LYDIA GARNETT
Text PAUL TONER
Taken from 10 Men Issue 64 – FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE – out NOW. Order your copy here.
Photography LYDIA GARNETT
Text PAUL TONER
