Events for Children and Young People

Discover how to train your brain and become the best you can be with the nation’s favourite doctor. Dr Ranj not only tells you how it works but also shows you how to train it to get better at stuff you find difficult. Following Dr Ranj’s advice will help you learn how to make the most of your brain and to keep your mind happy and healthy.

Pencils at the ready in this interactive event with the award-winning picture book illustrator, creator of Puffin Peter, Blue Penguin and Silly Suzy Goose. In Petr’s new book A Best Friend for Bear, finding a best friend isn’t easy, especially when you’re a bear. How lonely Black Bear meets Brown Bear and how together they decide to search for a friend for them both is a touching story that everyone can relate to.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative: your imagination is the limit.

Book for the session and you can drop in at any point during the 2.5 hour duration. An accompanying adult must attend at all times but does not require a ticket.

Join Onjali Q Raúf as she talks about the inspirations behind her bestselling books, what she loved to read as a child, her work with refugees – and all the wonderful people everywhere who help others, whenever they can, wherever they are. Learn how you, too, can use empathy to help make the world a better place.

No school. No THANKS. No. NO. NO! This punk rocker poodle is full of attitude. All she wants to do is stomp and stamp and pout, romping through the house and round and round at playgroup. That is, until naptime, when all she really wants is a… CUDDLE! Join Laura Dockrill for a funky, musical event full of anarchy, fun and a whole lot of attitude.

Bad Wolf’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s award-winning trilogy for HBO/BBC One has become a global sensation. Ahead of the highly-anticipated launch of Series Three this autumn, join cast members including Amir Wilson (Will Parry) and Simone Kirby (Mary Malone), along with film producer and co-founder of Bad Wolf Jane Tranter, for a discussion about the joys and challenges of bringing the series to life. The event will be interspersed with readings from Philip Pullman’s recent companion novel The Imagination Chamber. The cast will also be joined by the puppets and puppetry team who brought Pullman’s daemons and armoured Panserbjørn bears to life.

Come and join the fun in this interactive session with Editorial Director Craig Graham and Creative Director Mike Stirling from the Beano Studios. Together they are in charge of making sure that everything in the Beano is as funny and naughty as it can possibly be. They will also tell some favourite jokes from IP Daley’s latest boomic, Attack of the Evil Veg!

Join the award-winning author, environmentalist and zoologist to explore her new novel in which dark forces are destroying nature. Those with the ability to listen to animal thoughts stand in their way. Who will triumph in this epic conflict? Who will learn The Song That Sings Us and what it means, in the world of the story and on our own planet?

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative: your imagination is the limit.

Book for the session and you can drop in at any point during the 2.5 hour duration. An accompanying adult must attend at all times but does not require a ticket.

An environmental fairytale for all ages, newly made for our times by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Famished Road. In the forest near Mangoshi’s village in Africa there grows a very special flower. Mangoshi knows that only this flower can save her mother’s life. It can save her village, too. All she has to do is find it. Ben Okri and illustrator Diana Ejaita have created a magical forest of beauty and colour from which the great baobab, the chief tree of the forest, invites readers into his branches to travel the world and see for themselves the perils of not listening to nature.

Join Jenny Valentine for a creative writing workshop based on her joyful new series of stories. Jenny teaches children the tools of the trade to create believable characters in a real world setting and to focus on building a story around themes that they are passionate about.