Welcome to Luton Literature
We are a not-for-profit Community Interest Company based in Luton, which has been set up to encourage a love of reading and creative writing at any age through a range of events, activities and initiatives, and to promote the early uptake of reading in children.
Our secondhand community book shop, Brown Books, is located at 77 High Town Road, Luton LU2 0BW. Our February opening house are 12 noon to 5pm, Tuesday to Friday and 11am to 5pm on Saturday. New, longer opening hours will start in March.
Current Projects
Plans are afoot! Keep checking back or keep an eye on our social media for updates.
The Brown Books bookshop project
Luton Literature CIC and Luton Community Arts Trust are delighted to announce the opening of Brown Books in High Town at the end of April 2023.
This exciting pilot project will run for one year, during which time Luton Literature hopes to demonstrate the value and need for a bookshop in the area, and the positive impact it can make on the local community.
Luton Literature Book Festival
We successfully delivered our first ever Book Festival this year.
Take a look at our Facebook page to see all the photos and videos from the day.
Watch videos from our festival
You can now watch the live streamed videos on our YouTube channel.
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Past Projects
Past projects our fantastic team have been working on!
Luton Literature Book Festival
We’ll be delivering our first ever Book Festival this year.
High Town Christmas Fete
A full day packed with arts and crafts for children, Santa’s grotto, music and Christmas carols, and a stall with food, crafts and gifts. Find out more on our High Town Christmas Fete page.
Luton Literature workshops
As part of the Book Festival, we ran some creative writing workshops over the summer.
We produced a booklet with funding support from Luton Rising to showcase a selection of the creative pieces by those children who attended, and with some blank pages for those who came to the festival to have a go at creating their own works and to use in the events.
Download a copy using this link.
The Luton Literature Directors
Mariana Brown
Founder and director
Mariana set up the CIC in 2019 to deliver a range of initiatives and projects to make books, reading and all forms of creative writing more accessible to all. Having started reading comic books from an early age, she firmly believes if someone can find a style of writing, a character or a storyline that is relatable, or that they can identify with, it can potentially open up thousands of worlds and adventures for any new reader to explore…
Lee Nelson
Co-director of Luton LiteratureLee was invited to get involved pretty early on and was delighted to be asked. He has run workshops and writing groups of all sorts over the last 20 years as well as being one of the founders of the UTTER! Spoken Word organisation that helped to get Spoken-Word established as a distinct strand at the PBH Edinburgh FreeFringe…
Phoebe Heins
Co-director of Luton LiteraturePhoebe was super excited to be asked to work with Luton Literature. She has always strived to contribute positively to her local community and is passionate about making books widely accessible to all. Having graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in Liberal Arts and an Msc degree from the University of Edinburgh in Modern and Contemporary Art: Curation, Criticism and Art History, Phoebe knows the power of books in educating and inspiring both knowledge and growth.