VIRTUAL: An Evening with Jenny Colgan

We are delighted to get to host the launch of The Summer Skies, the new book by our First Date festival patron, Sunday Times bestseller Jenny Colgan. Jenny will be in conversation with Amna Saleem

Jenny is a stand-up comedian turned multi-million copy selling, award winning writer. Her debut novel, Amanda's Wedding, was hailed as a comic masterpiece and became an overnight bestseller. She has since been prolific in writing both romcoms and Sci-fi (notably for Dr Who).

She joins us to launch her delicious new novel Summer Skies!

This page sells the virtual tickets - for in-person tickets please visit this page.

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First Date is a collaboration between Lighthouse Bookshop - Edinburgh's radical bookshop - and the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

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

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.

At Scotland’s inaugural romance festival FIRST DATE, we'll be serving up a dazzling variety of romance books, have events discussing genre boundaries, subversive politics, queer joy, and feminist pleasure, and an all-day marketplace to find your next (or maybe your first?) romance read.

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Jenny Colgan is the author of numerous bestselling novels for adults, including Meet Me at the Cupcake Café and Little Beach Street Bakery. When Neil the puffin from Little Beach Street Bakery caught her readers’ attention, Jenny knew she needed a story of his own – and so the idea for Polly and the Puffin was born. Jenny is married with three children and lives in Scotland. For more about Jenny, visit her website and her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter: @jennycolgan.

Amna Saleem is a Scottish Pakistani screenwriter with a BBC Radio Four sitcom in its second season and several original TV projects in development. She has been published in two best selling anthologies It's Not About The Burqa and Who's Loving You. Before abandoning journalism for slightly healthier pastures, Amna wrote for publications such as The Guardian, BBC, GQ, New Statesmen and HuffPost amongst others.