Author appearances, poetry and spoken word events in London this week
Thursday 31 October
Julia Bird, Amy Key, Richard O’Brien and Sara-Mae Tuson read perform mildly erotic poetry at the Poetry Cafe. £5, 7.30pm
Poetry and comedy go head to head in Stand Up and Slam at the Comedy Cafe in Shoreditch. Team Poetry is headed by Dan Simpson, Team Comedy by Paul Sweeney and featuring Rob Auton, Keith Jay, Daniel Simonsen, Tom Deacon, Joel Dommett and Thom Tuck. £8, 8pm
William Sutcliffe discusses his novel The Wall, set in the West Bank, with Selma Dabbagh at the Mosaic Rooms. Free, 7pm
Pete the Temp and Patience Agbabi are the guests at Bang Said the Gun. £7 / £5, 8pm
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and others look at the British response to the Ugandan-Asian exodus in 1972, for the South Asian Literature Festival. Free, 6.30pm
Poet in the City presents an event all about Sappho, at the Bloomsbury Theatre with Tony Harrison, Margaret Reynolds, Edith Hall, Josephine Balmer and Richard Parkinson. £9.50 / £7.50, 7pm
Friday 1 November
The Richmond Literature Festival starts with Keats House Poets and the Read Right Here project performing at the Old Town Hall. Free, 6pm
Sarah Butler writes live for you, and is taking requests, at Woolfson & Tay as part of the Live Writing Series of events around London. Free, from 11.30am
Amit Chaudhuri, Jeet Thayil and Ted Hodgkinson discuss addictive cities at the Free Word Centre, for the South Asian Literature Festival‘s closing night. £5, 7pm
Young spoken word talent perform alongside Hollie McNish and Joelle Taylor in Slambassadors UK at the Southbank Centre. Free, 4pm
Follow the Slambassadors event with the winning stories from HMP Holloway and an open mic with StorySLAM:Live at the Southbank Centre, hosted by Malika Booker. £8, 7.45pm
Saturday 2 November
Spend an evening with The Vampyre, a lecture by Andrew Stott, the biographer of John Polidori, at St Pancras Old Church. £10, email st.p.appeal@gmail.com to book, 6pm
Go on a free storywalk around E17 with Words Over Waltham Forest at 11am and 2pm
Jennifer Gray and Amanda Swift are at the Castelnau Library in Richmond talking guinea pigs. £3, 11am
Sunday 3 November
Hear the shortlisted authors of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2013 at the Southbank Centre. £12 / £10, 8pm
Inua Ellams hosts Book Slam at the Tabernacle, with William Boyd, Emylia Hall and Ana Silvera. £10 / £12, 7.30pm
In Richmond, Simon Garfield talks about letter writing (£8.50 / £6, 2.30pm) and Peter Conradi reveals the story of when FDR met King George VI at Hyde Park on Hudson (£10 / £8.50, 7pm)
The Jane Duran group, Martina Thomson, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Jo Roach and Nora Hughes, are the guests at Torriano Poetry. £5 / £3, 7.30pm
Monday 4 November
Mexican/American poet Mark Gonzales performs at Housmans. £10, 6.45pm
There’s a day of events featuring Nikesh Shukla, Philip Hensher, Gemma Seltzer and more, plus a mini-fair for writers with the Writing Platform at Rich Mix. £44 / £39, from 10am
Andrew Stott is back, this time in Richmond to talk about The Vampyre Family and the curse of Byron. £8 / £6.50, 7pm
Colette Bryce, Ruby Robinson, Hugo Williams and Maurice Riordan launch the new issue of Poetry Review at the London Review Bookshop. Free, prebook, 7pm
Exiled Writers Ink celebrates Day of the Dead at the Poetry Cafe. £4, 7.30pm
Jo Shapcott, Christopher Reid, Richard Douglas Pennant, Huw Warren and Stuart Silver consider what we should have said, at Coffee House Poetry. £8 / £7, 8pm
Tuesday 5 November
Find out about Georgian London with Lucy Inglis at the Big Green Bookshop. £3, 7pm
Ian Rankin is signing copies of the new Rebus at West End Lane Books from 6pm
John Hegley and Cicely Herbert read poems about London and trains at the London Transport Museum. £15 / £12, 6.30pm
Niall O’Sullivan hosts the Poetry Cafe‘s open mic night, Poetry Unplugged. £5 / £4, 7.30pm
Historian Ben Urwand is at Waterstones Gower Street talking about Hollywood’s dark dealings with the Nazis. £5 / £3, 6.45pm
Wednesday 6 November
Ian Rankin’s at Waterstones Piccadilly talking about Rebus. £5 / £3, 7pm
Federico Campagna launches his new book The Last Night: Anti-work, Atheism, Adventure, at Housmans. £3, 7pm
Translators Frank Wynne and Ollie Brock go head-to-head with rival versions of the intro to Albert Camus’s The Outsider, at the Southbank Centre. £5, 7.30pm
Liz Bentley and Caroline Smith are Louche Women at the Poetry Cafe. 7.30pm
Writing From Prison is an evening showcasing writing by offenders, secure patients and detainees, at the Southbank Centre. £8, 7.45pm
Iain Sinclair gives a talk on the Beat poets at Somerset House, introduced by Deborah Moggach. £8 / £5, 7pm
Max Hastings is in Richmond discussing the tragedy of World War One. £10 / £8.50, 7.30pm
Steve Parker launches his book on the history of medicine at Barts Pathology Museum. £6, 6.30pm
Helen Chandler and Jamie Baywood talk about their debut novels and lives at Walthamstow Library. Free, 7pm
Follow @LondonistLit for our pick of that day’s literary events.