Birmingham Literature Festival – in pictures

This year’s Birmingham Literature Festival is in full swing with its biggest and most impressive line-up to date. Capturing the authors and writers at each event is photographer Lee Allen. We’ve picked a few our our favourite images from the headline acts: Benjamin Zephaniah, Germaine Greer, Radio 4’s Poetry Please, Will Self and Shami Chakrabarti.

Birmingham Literature Festival

There’s a silence every reader experiences from time-to-time. A cold silence which you sit through; frozen, passive, reflective. It’s a silence which inhabits you and renders you speechless for hours: this is the consequence faced by the reader of a good book. So many books drive us to this incredible state; they leave us fulfilled yet hungry, complete yet lost. Books give us so much, yet we take for granted their existence for our pleasure and rarely consider how they came to be.

Pogus Caesar – Sparkbrook Pride

Birmingham-based photographer Pogus Caesar has a new book coming out, specially commissioned by Be Birmingham and published by Punch and OOM Gallery Archive. Sparkbrook Pride consists of 70 black-and-white photos of residents of Sparkbrook – where Pogus grew up – all taken with his trademark Canon Sureshot camera. The book also has a foreword written by Benjamin Zephaniah and an introduction by Paris-based photographer Nigel Dickinson.