First Date 2026 edition

Save the Date dear reader: from 24 April to 8 May YOU are once again invited to join us for another edition of our First Date romance festival!

As great lovers of romance and feel good fiction - and following a fortuitous conversation with Jenny Colgan in 2022 - we thought it was high time we created a platform for a much beloved genre that deserves its own stage, and so we launched FIRST DATE!

For the fourth year of FIRST DATE, Lighthouse Bookshop and Book Lovers Bookshop have teamed up again to bring you TWO WEEKS of events, including writing workshops, panel discussions, late night shopping and lots more!

FIRST DATE serves up a dazzling variety of romance books, events discussing genre boundaries, subversive politics, queer joy and feminist pleasure.

To give you a sneak peek at the programme, in-person events will include Beth O’Leary, Elle McNicoll, Lizzie Huxley-Jones, Olivia Belle, Leigh Rivers, Lily X, and many more!

Lots more authors will be announced when the full programme drops on 13th February, so do mark that date in your diary - that's also when tickets go on sale, at 1pm across both the Lighthouse Bookshop and Book Lovers Bookshop platforms.

‘Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom’ - adrienne maree brown

I know we say it every year, but it deserves to be said again: Romance writing has long shown that the personal is definitely political.

The genre has hosted important conversations on consent, and represents a huge diversity of stories which are still missing from mainstream fiction - joy and pleasure for women, queer people, people of colour, fat people, disabled people, and more. Too often it’s seen as a frivolous genre - but our pleasure is not frivolous! Our pleasure is radical.

Events will take place at Lighthouse Bookshop, Book Lovers Bookshop, Lady and the Bear cafe, Nicolson Square Venues and other venues to be announced, showing you lots of facets of the genre we love.

All Lighthouse events (with the exception of writing workshops) will be livestreamed to the Lighthouse website & YouTube for anyone who wants to join in from afar. You can browse the events, reserve your tickets, and pre-order books as we announce the programme and open for ticket bookings on 13th February at 1pm!

Want a wee taste of what past festivals have served up? You can watch back some of our delicious events from previous years, here (2025) here (2024) and here (2023)!