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***EVENT FULLY BOOKED***

We are excited to announce that Louise O’Hare will be appearing at The Broadway Bookshop on Thursday 5 March 2026 in a special event celebrating her book Centrefold 1974: A Memoir, published in 2024 by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. Louise will be joined by Holly Pester (The Lodgers) and Nida Sajid (COOP: A Novelette) who will be responding to Centrefold and reading new work.

Shifting between the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, and 1970s New York and Los Angeles, Centrefold takes in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, performances of motherhood, and masturbation.

Pulling out threads from this ‘mesmerising work of feminist research’ (Helen Charman), O’Hare, Pester and Sajid will engage with gossip, lullabies, rest/worksongs, daughterhood, friendship, solidarity, and the potentials and complicities of liberal institutions during these times of expanding repression of dissent, colonisation and genocide.

Readings will start at 7pm and be compèred by Jess Chandler of Prototype Publishing, who wrote the recent open letter from independent presses on the worsening economic realities of small press publishing – warning of the further loss of publishers who enable creative risk, foster experimentation, and challenge an environment of increasing state censorship of Palestine solidarity.

Copies of Centrefold 1974: A Memoir, Nida Sajid’s first novel COOP (Hajar Press, 2025), and Holly Pester’s The Lodgers (Granta, 2024), Comic Timing (Granta, 2021), Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip (Book Works, 2015), and Common Rest (a vinyl by Test Centre, 2016) will be on display and available to purchase.

Drinks (Lillet, with lime) will be served.

Entry is FREE but spaces are limited. RSVP: books@broadwaybookshophackney.com

***EVENT FULLY BOOKED***

We hope you can join us!

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Centrefold, 1974: A Memoir by Louise O’Hare
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, November 2024

Following the publication of Centrefold in Artforum, November 1974, Benglis says that Penthouse wanted to use the image, but instead she proposed ‘a take-off on a traditional pieta, depicting a beautiful girl as the Madonna with a nude man on her lap’. They refused, ‘we cannot do that, we cannot allow artists to make a centrefold.’

Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of that Centrefold, and shifting between 1970s New York and Los Angeles and the Corbyn years in Tower Hamlets, London, this Centrefold enacts an ambivalent ‘full accounting’ of Lynda Benglis’s Artforum spread, as well as her gender ‘mockeries’ and Secrets series. Taking in nursery privatisation, artworld silencing and censorship, maintenance art, muddled Marxism, performances of motherhood, and masturbation, Louise O’Hare weighs up the various impacts and forms of disciplining at play in both column and dildo inches.

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Louise O’Hare is a policy researcher and writer concerned with how liberatory potentials are disciplined within early years movements – the NGOism of feminism and how we talk about state care. She is an organiser of Post Pandemic Childcare coalition, part of the On the Record childcare oral histories project, was an editor at Afterall from 2013–17, and founded the London Bookshop Map (2011–16). Centrefold 1974: A Memoir is her first book.

https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site/Louise-O-Hare-CENTREFOLD-1974-A-MEMOIR-2024

Holly Pester has been hailed as one of the most original poets of her generation. The Lodgers, her debut novel published in 2024, prises open and ransacks the minor dramas of temporary living, against the backdrop of Britain’s ongoing housing crisis. Her critical creative work has included sound art and performance, with original dramatic work on BBC Radio 4, and collaborations with Serpentine Galleries, Women’s Art Library, and Wellcome Collection. Comic Timing, her Forward Prize-nominated first full collection of poetry, was published by Granta, 2021.

https://granta.com/contributor/holly-pester/

Nida Sajid’s COOP: A Novelette (2025) was published in December by Hajar Press and follows Lena, a part-time bookseller in a bougie design studio in Oxford Circus. In between minimum-wage work under a politically hostile boss and strained communications with her parents, Lena’s days are shaped by a fraught relationship with food, ambiguous experiments in creative writing, and mounting pressure to find a ‘proper’ postgraduate job. Hannah Regel has described the book as transforming ‘the daily humiliations of retail work and zero-hour contracts, calorie counting and pompous dates into (to quote Lena quoting Marx) a “coup d’état in miniature” upon the page’.

https://www.hajarpress.com/books/coop

Jess Chandler is the founder and publisher of Prototype, was a co-founder of Test Centre, which ran from 2011 to 2018, and co-runs the imprint House Sparrow Press. She was a 2024 Bookseller Rising Star, and late last year wrote the open letter from independent presses on the worsening economic realities of small press publishing – warning of the further loss of publishers who enable creative risk, foster experimentation, and challenge an environment of increasing state censorship of Palestine solidarity and repression.

https://lithub.com/life-giving-imaginative-and-underfunded-small-press-publishers-in-crisis/

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE is a publishing project by the artist and writer Sharon Kivland, who invites authors she considers to be good readers, whom she would like to house in her library or to become her library, inhabited. She agrees with Nabokov that a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader, is a re-reader.

https://mabibliotheque.cargo.site

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Order your copy of Centrefold 1974: A Memoir >>