We’re currently experiencing a major technology outage due to a cyber attack. 

However, all our upcoming events are going ahead as planned. You can find more information about how to book below. 

Friday 24 November

The Polari Prize 2023 – available at the Library. Book online

Sunday 26 November

Family Station: Explore and Play – available at the Library. Book online

Tuesday 28 November

The Panizzi Lectures 2023: Thomas Hearne’s Matters – A Life of Books – available at the Library and online. Book online

Tuesday 30 November

An Evening with Philip Pullman – Cancelled

Saturday 2 December and Sunday 3 December

Fairytale Afterlives: Cinderella – available at the Library. Book online

Tuesday 5 December

WritersMosaic presents: Cybernetics and Ghosts, Technology and Storytelling – available at the Library. Book online

Thursday 7 December

The Panizzi Lectures 2023: Thomas Hearne’s Matters – A Life of Books – available at the Library and online. Book online

Friday 8 December

Session 1 (9:45am – 10:45am): Family Under 5s Workshops: The Rhinoceros who wants to be a Star – available at the Library. Book online

Session 2 (11:00am – 12:00pm): Session 1: Family Under 5s Workshops: The Rhinoceros who wants to be a Star – available at the Library. Book online

Saturday 9 December

Session 1 (10:30am – 12:00pm): Family Workshops: Fantastic Comics with Neill Cameron – available at the Library. Book online

Session 2 (1:00pm – 2:30pm): Family Workshops: Fantastic Comics with Neill Cameron – available at the Library. Book online

All That Glitters: Decorative Calligraphy – available at the Library. Book online

Fantasy Worlds: A Day of Talks – available online only. Book now

Fantasy Worlds: Rebecca F. Kuang in Conversation – in-person tickets sold out. Online day passes available 

Fantasy Worlds: Visualising Fantasy – in-person tickets sold out. Online day passes available

Fantasy Worlds: Fantasy Maps – available at the Library. Book now 

Fantasy Worlds: Mary Shelley, Uprisings and Rebellions – available at the Library. Book now

Fantasy Worlds: World Building in Fantasy – available at the Library. Book now

Board Games Fest at the British Library – available at the Library. Book now

Monday 11 December

Libraries and positive climate action: preserving collections – available online only. Book now 

Thursday 14 December

The Panizzi Lectures 2023: Thomas Hearne’s Publications – A Life of Books – available at the Library and online. Book online

Monday 8 January

Wilkie Collins: the man, the myth and the Moonstone – available online only. Book now

Tuesday 9 January

Twenty First Century Tolkien – available online only. Book now

Thursday 11 January 2024

Conservation Studio Tour – available at the Library. Book now

Susanna Clarke and Alan Moore in Conversation – available online only. Book now

Thursday 18 January

Forever After: Angela Carter and the Re-Invention of the Fairy Tale – available online only. Book now 

Tuesday 23 January

The Realms of Ursula K. Le Guin – available online only. Book now

Friday 26 January

#Merky Books Loves Malorie Blackman – available at the Library. Book now

Thursday 1 February 2024

Conservation Studio Tour – available at the Library. Book now

Friday 2 February

Queer Fantasy – available at the Library and online. Book now 

Monday 5 February

Chinese Culture through Photography – available at the Library. Book now

Tuesday 6 February

Black to the Future presents Imaginary Cities – available at the Library and online. Book now

Tuesday 13 February

Behind The Yellow Wallpaper: A Workshop – available at the Library. Book now

Dungeons and Dragons at 50 – available at the Library and online. Book now

Tuesday 20 February

The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour: Goblin Market and other Poems – available at the Library and online. Book now

Friday 23 February

Malorie Blackman in conversation with Bernardine Evaristo – available at the Library and online. Book now

Saturday 24 February

The World Builders: The Influence of Fantasy in Film and Games Design poems – available at the Library and online. Book now

Mervyn Peake: Writer and Artist – available online only. Book now

BIPC events and workshops  

See all events

Tours

Building Tour at the Library. Book now

Treasures Tour at the Library. Book now

Libraries and positive climate action webinars

Our series of webinars focused on libraries and the climate emergency are still going ahead as planned:

Libraries and positive climate action: sustainable buildings

Tuesday 21 November, 10.00 – 11.30

Libraries and positive climate action: preserving collections

Monday 11 December, 10:00 – 11.30

Accessing our events

If you have booked a ticket for any of our events this remains valid, please see your ticket for event information.  

If you have booked for an online event you will receive your viewing link by email on the day of the event. Please bear with us as our processes are little different than usual. 

Future events

We’ll update this blog with more information and ticket links for future events as soon as we can.  

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition

If you have previously purchased tickets for our new exhibition, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, can still use them. Exhibition tickets can now also be booked via See Tickets or bought onsite.

Contacting us

While our systems are offline, you can contact us by emailing [email protected]. We’ll do our best to answer your queries but please bear with us. This inbox is reviewed from 08:30 to 16:30 Monday to Friday. We’re experiencing a high volume of enquiries so it may take us some time to respond. We’ll get back to you as quickly as we can.

We’d like to thank all of our users and partners for your continued understanding.

Nicholas Calvin Mwakatobe is a filmmaker, photographer and curator based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He is creating short films using the British Library’s sound archive collections as an online artist in residence for Resonations 2023, a programme supported by the British Council

It’s really exciting to be an artist in residence with the British Library. It’s an opportunity to explore recordings from the past which provide a unique point of access to history. Some of the stories, spoken words and sounds are not recorded anywhere else. It gives you a visceral connection to a time that is now gone. 

The way that we tell our own stories is a tool for survival. I'm interested in different ways in which we remember the past and foresee the future, whether through paintings, stories or songs, and deal with the question of who we are. The residency gives me better ways of unearthing local stories. 

 

For an artist, this is very rich ground

An archive is one way of accessing the past. But each individual, group or community that has been recorded has their own way of thinking about and caring for their history. It’s interesting to combine these two ways of approaching the past, the living system and the recording. The oral tradition is very susceptible to change. It evolves; it lives; it morphs. The archive always stays the same. For an artist, this is very rich ground for new questions.  

So far, I have listened to quite a few recordings and explored different ideas. I’m very interested in how the Swahili language has evolved over time. Someone who exemplifies the way the language spread and changed is a musician, Siti binti Saad, whose music is recorded in the Library’s sound archive. She was born in 1880 and died in 1950. In the 1920s and 1930s, she was a very prominent musician on the island of Zanzibar. The genre that she was singing in was taarab, which drew influences from countries across the Indian Ocean.

 

The recordings capture centuries of interchange

For centuries, before the first Europeans set foot in Africa, people used to travel in Dhow sailboats between the coast of East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and India, as far as China. This travelling resulted in a lot of cultural exchanges: music; food; architecture. Saad’s music blends sounds from across the regions where the Dhow boats travelled. 

After she became famous as a taarab musician, she performed internationally. The recordings we have of Siti encapsulate centuries of interchange between the coast of East Africa and the regions around the Indian Ocean. If you look deeply enough, they point you in so many different directions. 

 

The archive becomes a portal through time

I want to go back to the community from which these materials were recorded, and the people who are still performing Saad’s music as standard taraab repertoire. I’ll use film to capture the sound, the people, the bodies that still, in some way, echo and carry forward these voices from the past. 

I also found recordings of Ali Swahili, a prisoner of war in Berlin in 1918. They say he was born in Comoros, but he spoke and sang in Swahili. He was recorded several times in October and November of 1918. The fact that I can listen to these recordings in Swahili, made in a prisoner-of-war camp, inspires questions about how he ended up there. Why was someone interested in recording him? This type of recording carries more than just sound waves. The archive becomes a portal through time.

 

The stories you’re telling are sometimes larger than you

My job is to connect all these different elements through film and put them in conversation with each other. Then we ask, how do we move forward from here? We know these recordings were made within very specific political and socio-economic contexts, a good number of them during colonial times, whether in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s, when the Germans were controlling the East African territory, or from the 1920s to the 1960s, when the British were here. 

As an artist, the stories that you're telling are sometimes larger than you. If you’re a filmmaker, especially if you are a documentary filmmaker, you are a channel for all these voices to say something. I think at the core of it all is curiosity, having questions that you can’t answer. You find yourself taking on the role of a photographer, a filmmaker, a curator, depending on what stories you are trying to pursue. It’s almost as if each story has its own demands, and you are responding to them. 

 

There are not many sound repositories around

My residency is remote, but you can interact with the Library’s sound archive online. The Library has helped me access material and answer questions. Being there physically would create different kinds of possibilities. But I can do a lot with the access that I have. 

There are not many sound repositories around. The thing that hooked me on the Library’s archive early on was that I was looking at the website and saw Swahili recordings from the 1930s that were made in India. I was already interested in the movement of people, trades, goods and ideas across the Indian Ocean. To see that the recordings were made in India and sung in Swahili was fascinating to me. On a personal level, just the fact that there were a lot of Swahili recordings within the archive was a point of excitement. I was able to explore something that I have a connection with.

As told to Lucy Peters

 

Relevant recordings

Siti binti Saad: Explore the British Library Search - siti binti saad (bl.uk)

Francis mwa Kitime: Explore the British Library Search - Kitime (bl.uk)

The incredible artwork for our exhibition, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, was created by hand by illustrator Sveta Dorosheva. She seamlessly wove together the four realms of our exhibition: fairy tales and folklore, worlds and portals, epics and quests, and the weird and uncanny – each area populated with myriad characters and creatures from literature and myth across the world.

We sat down with Sveta to find out more about her, the artwork itself, and where she draws her inspiration from.

We recommend viewing the full-sized illustration here. Zoom in and explore Sveta’s universe for yourself!

You can also find a labelled guide to all the characters and creatures in Sveta's artwork near the bottom of this page.

 

Which fantasy universes were you most inspired by in this illustration?

Fairy tales and myths, in the first place. As a child, I had very weak health and spent many hours in bed, covered with mustard leaves or cupping-glasses, while dad read fairy tales to me.

I was so in love with this project because it kind of maps perfectly onto my obsessions with all things weird and wonderful: tales, myths, obscure science and mysterious arts like alchemy, medieval bestiaries, etc.

I think I keep returning to fairy tales because it's a way to smuggle a sense of wonder from childhood into adult life. When I was a kid and dad read those tales to me, I perceived a frog turning into a prince and day turning into night as the same type of metamorphosis that makes the world tick. Kids generally don't divide things into real and unreal.

When I wasn’t sick, I spent most of my time outdoors with other kids. The vicinities (I grew up in Zaporizhzhya in Ukraine, at that time part of the USSR) were a small forest, a city mortuary, and the Red River, complete with red fish. The river was actually red from factory waste, and back then, I used to think that all small rivers were red. It fell into a large river in beautiful red stripes at the spot of the local nudist beach, replete with brilliantly scarlet nudists. One has to admit, I grew up in a fairy tale of sorts – it was that bizarre.

So, as a kid I spent half of my time in that surreal world, and the other half in fairy tale books. I was enthralled by their murky, fickle world. Everything turned into everything else. Beasts talked and threw off their skins to turn into humans. Mysterious water revived the dead. A forest witch lived in a house on chicken legs and had a flipping bed that tossed incautious travellers into the underworld.

There was even a version of Donkeyskin, where the girl into an entangled cow’s stomach by her stepmother. She predicted that "the enchantment will be broken only if the king kisses you, ha-ha-ha!" I remember trying to imagine that, and thinking if there’s a happy ending to that story, the world might not be such a hard place to live, right?

At the time, I didn't perceive any of this as weird or unreal. These were just part of a fascinating plot. There was no division into normal and unusual. Everything was unusual, nothing was normal. That kind of perception, smuggled from childhood into adult life, is still with me when I draw: treat fantasy and reality as one and the same.

 

Who’s your favourite character in the illustration?

I got a kick doing every little nook of it, can't pick a favourite section! But as for characters, I guess Gregor Samsa reading Kafka is my personal favourite. I was on a surreal and absurd literature spree more than once in recent years - I take a lot of comfort in it, when I feel discombobulated and unable to make sense of the world. And each time I feel compelled to re-read Metamorphosis just for the feeling of poignant realisation that, you know, it's life - sometimes you just wake up inexplicably transformed into a huge cockroach. Despite being clueless as to what's going on and how long it will last, you still have to carry on with your life somehow.

Evidently, people have been there before - bewitched, bothered and bewildered by the rapid change or lost in the weird and incomprehensible reality around them. Kafka has diligently documented that for us to take comfort in during troubled times.

 

Were there any parts of the design that were particularly challenging?

The whole thing was technically challenging to put together. The task was to seamlessly weave together four realms corresponding to sections of the exhibition (fairy tales and folklore, worlds and portals, epics and quests, and weird and uncanny) into a single composition, each populated with its own characters and imbued with a relevant mood. Changing a single detail often entailed redoing half the composition. 

 

How long did it take you to create the design?

My longest stage is always the first one - research and ideas. Coming up with the first draft. In this case, it was a very detailed draft, since with so many characters, themes and landscape elements in a black and white image, one of the key things was to figure out the tonal scheme and how all of it would work. So my first draft was basically a finished drawing in pencil, just to try and see how it comes together. That took over a month. Then there was some feedback and revisions. Mostly, the ‘portals’ part got reworked into a subterraneous library with secret passages and mysterious visitors.

The final art was larger than the draft (A1), and done with a dip drawing nib in ink, so that, too, took me about three weeks, maybe a month.

 

Are you a fan of fantasy, or any of its subgenres? Do you have any particular favourites?

I think my favourite type of fantasy and weird literature is when a book is full of uncanny and surreal stuff, yet it reads like a realistic novel. Ned Beauman is mind-blowing that way, everything he’s written, but especially The Teleportation Accident and Madness is Better than Defeat. John Crowley’s Aegypt series – I lived inside his books, but the odd thing is, I had a feeling that the author had lived inside my head for quite some time too. Otherwise, how would he know so much about me?

George Saunders - absolutely unique, all of his short story collections. After reading these authors I feel orphaned and forlorn, because I can't read anything else and instantly start missing the time I had spent inside their books. I owe them some of the happiest hours of my life. 

Jeffrey Ford and China Miéville too. I discovered China Miéville while working on this project, and have been reading his Bas-Lag trilogy throughout the summer. 

 

This illustration was created by hand by Sveta Dorosheva especially for the exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. Originally from Ukraine and currently based in Israel, Sveta works in areas of narrative art and illustration. A deep fascination for myth and fairytales, among other things, finds its way into her detailed and award-winning works.

More information and examples of her work can be found at svetadorosheva.com

You can also follow Sveta on Instagram @sveta_illustrations.

Set out on a legendary quest through the impossible worlds of fantasy by visiting our new exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination, opening on Friday 27 October.