Spoken word performance by Hollie McNish featuring poems, stories, and chat from her collection 'Virgin' and other works.
Hollie McNish brings The Paperback Tour to the York Theatre Royal on Saturday 3 April 2027, playing in the Main House. She's a Sunday Times bestselling author, and this is a spoken word night rather than a reading — a mix of chat, poems and stories. Part of the set comes from her collection Virgin, but she'll be working around that with a selection of her firm favourites and some new work too.
The subject matter is all over the place, which is part of the appeal. She'll be talking about love, loss and friendship, and then shifting to wolves, croissants and sticky toffee pudding. It's that jump from the heavy to the domestic that gives her work its particular pull, and hearing it performed live is a different thing from reading it on the page.
She's earned a fair bit of praise from people who know their way around a stage. Matt Haig has called her "one of the best poets we have", and Sarah Millican describes her as "funny, so smart and refreshingly honest". Paapa Essiedu puts it in a slightly different light, saying she "makes me cry and howl with laughter" — and that's a good summary of the range she aims for in a single evening.
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It's the kind of night that works for a few different setups: a proper outing with friends or a partner, a book club meeting up outside their usual spot, or just going on your own. The show is at the York Theatre Royal on Saturday 3 April 2027, in the Main House.
