First Date is back for 2025!

Save the Date dear reader: from 17-31 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 give you FIRST DATE!

For the third year of FIRST DATE, we’ve teamed up with the Book Lovers Bookshop 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.

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

I know we said it last 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, 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 below as we announce our programme over the next few weeks!