When: 29th – 30th July 2017
Where: The Book Club, 100 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4RH
£: Tickets cost £11.21 – £16.52
What is it?
This weekend The Book Club in Shoreditch will be hosting Potter, Past and Present, a two-day Harry Potter conference.
Potter, Past and Present is a literary conference, with added cocktails, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Harry Potter books. There’ll be a wide variety of talks and panels at the conference, considering the diverse legacy (and future) of the Potter books, and presenting some fascinating ideas to the public for the first time.
There will be academics, writers, journalists and fans bringing original discussions to the conference, along with curated debates and many fun extras, including the ultimate Harry Potter trivia quiz on Saturday evening.
The conference will include a pop-up Chamber of Secrets cocktail bar, complete with sorting hat cocktails in the HP house colours.
Chris Rankin, who played Percy Weasley in the Harry Potter films, will be speaking on the ‘Did the movies do the books justice?’ panel, along with Anna Leszkiewicz from the New Statesman, and Simran Hans, film critic for The Observer.
There will also be academic speakers from the Universities of Oxford, Exeter, Kent, Roehampton and UCL. Talk subjects will include ‘The Patil Twins as a study in race in Harry Potter World’, ‘Death and Consolation: Modelling positive attitudes to loss in Harry Potter’, and ‘Will the Wizarding World Ever Learn? Circularity and mirroring in Harry Potter’.
Other speakers will include the author Dolores Gordon-Smith, political journalist Marie Le Conte, comedian Alex Kealy, and pop culture writer Emmy Griffiths.
A conference pass includes tickets to all talks and panels, access to the Chamber of Secrets Cocktail bar (with a special Harry Potter themed menu for the weekend), and free entry to the Book Club’s club night, which begins at 8pm.
More info: thebookclub.eventcube.io