The pop-up library opens beside the Victoria Park bandstand on Friday 31 July and Saturday 1 August, with hundreds of books available to browse and borrow for free.
There are worse ways to spend a summer weekend than borrowing a book and reading it in the grass beside Victoria Park’s bandstand. This weekend, there’s a new reason to do exactly that.
A free open-air library is setting up shop in Victoria Park from 31 July to 1 August, and it’s the first in the UK dedicated entirely to self-published authors. The shelves will carry hundreds of titles spanning romance, thrillers, fantasy and contemporary fiction, all of them by independent writers who bypassed traditional publishing routes entirely.
The context is the tenth anniversary of the Kindle Storyteller Award, an annual £20,000 literary prize for self-published books that has received over 70,000 entries since launching in 2016. The library will feature past winners alongside titles connected to authors including Colleen Hoover and Freida McFadden, whose careers are worth understanding if you haven’t encountered them before.
Hoover spent years building a readership through self-publishing and word of mouth before BookTok turned her into one of the bestselling authors on the planet. McFadden wrote thrillers from her spare bedroom for years before The Housemaid became a global phenomenon. Both are among the most remarkable publishing stories of the last decade, and both started exactly where the books in this library started.
The library is completely free, no booking required. Visitors can browse, borrow a book and settle in the park for the afternoon. It runs Friday 31 July from 3pm to 8pm and Saturday 1 August from 10am to 6pm.
The London x London Take: The corporate sponsorship is Amazon, which you can take or leave, but the thing itself is a genuinely good summer afternoon: a free library in one of East London’s best parks, stocked with books that prove you don’t need a publishing deal to build a readership. Worth knowing about.
Need to Know
- Where: Victoria Park bandstand, Victoria Park, London E9
- When: Friday 31 July, 3pm to 8pm; Saturday 1 August, 10am to 6pm
- Price: Free, no booking required
- Nearest tube: Mile End (Central and District lines), then 15 minutes’ walk
