The London Literature Festival will take place from the 3rd to the 12th of June, this is the 6th annual festival and it will return to the Southbank Centre. The London Literature Festival will feature headline names Siri Hustvedt, John Pilger, Clive Stafford Smith, Andy Kershaw, Noo Saro-Wiwa, Will Self, Stella Duffy and Mark Haddon, as well as children’s authors Michael Morpurgo and Andy Stanton.

This year’s festival will consist of three broad strands: Capital Stories; Arab Revolutions; and poetry slam, Shake the Dust. This promises to be an unforgettable weekend of spoken word performance, with the highlight of this years festival will be a weekend-long poetry extravaganza with the culmination of Shake the Dust, the biggest youth poetry slam competition in the country, led by Saul Williams, one of the most influential voices on the international spoken word scene, and the UK’s very own rap battling, hip-hop MC Kate Tempest. There will be nine teams in total from across the country competing in the final.

One should prepare to be truly blown away by the energy, originality, honesty and virtuosity of this new generation of writers and performers.