The Book Club: Live — First Ever Stage Edition
Goalhanger's The Book Club makes its live debut at the Southbank Centre, bringing literary conversation and author encounters to the stage for the first time.
Why we picked this
The first live outing for one of Goalhanger's most intimate shows — a format built on genuine enthusiasm for books rather than marketing-driven author promotion.
The Book Club is Goalhanger’s podcast dedicated to books — what they say, why they matter, and how reading shapes the way we think. The format is conversation rather than review: hosts and guests work through a text together, finding what is alive in it and what a particular book opens up for the reader willing to follow it. Guests have ranged from authors discussing their own work to critics and readers whose engagement with literature goes beyond the professional.
For its first ever live edition, The Book Club takes the Purcell Room stage as part of Goalhanger: The Rest Is Fest (4–6 September 2026), the three-day festival that marks the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary. Full details on which book and guests will be featured have not yet been announced, but the show shares the weekend with The Rest Is History, The Rest Is Science, and The Rest Is Politics — a programming slate that positions the festival firmly in the tradition of public intellectual exchange.
The Purcell Room, with its capacity of around 300, makes it one of the more intimate venues in the Southbank Centre complex — appropriate for a show whose appeal is the feeling that you are inside a genuinely good conversation about a genuinely good book.