LL185: A Room of One's Own (Performance in person)
As The London Library celebrates both its 185th anniversary and the opening of our New Room, a new dedicated learning and participation space which will widen our reach, we aptly turn to one of the most important texts by one of our most iconic former members, with a rousing new adaptation for the stage.
A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s 1928 feminist polemic, which explores the silence and erasure of women’s voices from literature throughout the centuries and considers the conditions a writer needs to thrive and become great. Funny, sharp and insightful, it is a powerful call for women’s creative and intellectual freedom, a challenge to the canon and an urgent appeal for diversity and accessibility in literature, which still resonates today.
This new one woman play, adapted from Woolf’s essay by award-winning playwright Linda Marshall Griffiths and directed by Roxana Silbert, will be performed in our atmospheric Reading Room, where Woolf would once have read, written, thought and been inspired. Performances will be followed each evening by different discussions and conversations inspired by the themes of the play, as follows (times indicate the performance. The talks will take place directly after each performance):
Wednesday 10 June, 7pm
Publishers Ella Griffiths of Faber Editions, D-M Withers of Lurid Editions and Magdalene Abraha of Jacaranda Books speak to Bidisha about their projects to bring lost classic texts back into print, challenging the canon and re-establishing important, often marginalised, voices.
Thursday 11 June, 7pm
Fiona Sampson, biographer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Shelley and George Sand, Helen Bain, author of The Daffodil Days, a novel exploring Sylvia Plath’s life in Devon, and A Room of One's Own playwright Linda Marshall Griffiths speak to Katie Popperwell about how, against all the odds, women throughout history have created the necessary conditions enabling them to write some of literature’s most important works.
Friday 12 June, 7pm
Katie da Cunha Lewin discusses her new book, The Writers’ Room, in which she explores the places where people write and the mythologised spaces that have shaped the books we love. In conversation with author Nikita Lalwani, she dismantles the familiar furniture of the writer’s room and investigates the structural privileges behind having 'a room of one’s own.'
Saturday 13 June, 7pm:
Poet, translator and former academic Ian Patterson speaks to Katie Popperwell about his new book Books: A Manifesto, or How to Build a Library, in which, like Woolf, he makes a timely argument as to why books, libraries and breadth of writing make the world a better place.
This is part of LL185, a series of events celebrating 185 years of The London Library as a home of inspiration, including talks, workshops and performances, delving into our history, collection and community and looking to the future. See our What’s On page for more information.
Performances begin at 7pm each night. The play runs for just under an hour and will be immediately followed by a 45-minute talk. Doors (and the bar) open 30 minutes before each performance.
Creative team
Linda Marshall Griffiths is an award-winning playwright and novelist. Her work for BBC radio and podcasts includes Saint Joan of the Anthropocene, a finalist in the Prix Italia 2025 and BBC Best Adaptation 2026, A Vindication of Frankenstein’s Monster, No Place but the Water and Strings, a finalist in the Tinniswood Award 2023. Stage plays include Vilette and The Secret Garden (Leeds Playhouse) and Pomegranate (Manchester Royal Exchange), which won the Pearson Playwright Award, Manchester Evening News Best New Play and was a finalist in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her first speculative novel, The Sky is the First Thing, was a finalist in the Andromeda Science Fiction Prize 2025. She has a PhD on silence.
Roxana Silbert directs for stage, screen and audio. She works mainly on original drama. She was Artistic Director of Hampstead Theatre (2019-2022); Artistic Director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre (2013-2019); Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (2009-2013); Artistic Director of Paines Plough Theatre Company (2005-2009); Literary Director at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (2001-2004); and Associate Director of the Royal Court (1998-2000).
Cast
TBC
Speakers
Magdalene Abraha is Publishing Director at Jacaranda Books and a writer and cultural curator. A former Forbes 30 Under 30 awardee for her work in writing and publishing, she began her journalism career as one of the youngest-ever columnists for The Independent, where she covered politics, art, and popular culture.
Helen Bain works as a sub editor at the Financial Times and was formerly at the Guardian, Vogue and Red. She was on The London Library Emerging Writers Programme from 2020-21. Her debut novel, The Daffodil Days, was published this year by Bloomsbury.
Bidisha is a broadcaster, presenter and journalist. She covers the arts and culture and current affairs for the BBC, CNN, Channel 5 and Sky News. Her most recent publication is the essay The Future of Serious Art.
Katie da Cunha Lewin is the author of The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love. She is a writer and an academic with a PhD in contemporary literature and her reviews and essays have appeared in multiple publications including the TLS, Prospect, The White Review and many more.
Ella Griffiths is Head of Classics and Heritage at Faber. In 2021, she launched Faber Editions, a new series spotlighting radical literary voices from history. She was named a Bookseller Rising Star in 2022 and LBF Trailblazer in 2023.
Nikita Lalwani is a novelist and screenwriter. Her novels included Gifted, which won the inaugural Desmond Elliot Prize, The Village, which won a Jerwood Uncovered Award and You People. For the screen she has written on Sky Studios’ Under Salt Marsh, BBC1/Amazon series The Outlaws and romantic comedy, Picture This.
Ian Patterson is a poet, translator, former academic and former second-hand bookseller. The translator of Finding Time Again, the final volume of the Penguin Proust, he is also the author of Guernica and Total War and Nemo's Almanac. He won the Forward Prize for Best Poem in 2017, with an elegy for his late wife, Jenny Diski.
Katie Popperwell is an arts consultant, broadcaster and Chair of Manchester UNESCO City of Literature, working at the intersection of literature, culture and public life. She regularly hosts conversations with leading writers and is a former presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts programme Front Row.
Fiona Sampson is a poet, literary biographer and writer about place. She has published over 30 books, won multiple prizes and was awarded an MBE for services to literature. Her recent biographies include In Search of Mary Shelley, Two-Way Mirror: the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and, most recently, Becoming George, a biography of George Sand.
D-M Withers is Director of Lurid Editions, a publisher of rediscovered queer books from the Twentieth Century archive. A Lecturer in Publishing at the University of Exeter, D-M has published research on Virago Press, including Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing (CUP, 2021).
Books by all speakers will be available to buy at the event and online from our partner bookshop Hatchards.
NB Each event will take place in person at The London Library. Performances begin at 7pm each night. The play runs for just under an hour and will be immediately followed by a 45-minute talk. Doors (and the bar) open 30 minutes before each performance. Please see our Event Access Guidelines before you arrive.
