The Women of the World Festival is back at London’s Southbank Centre 9-11 March. I’ll be talking about the futures women dream of with Fiona Sampson MBE, author GX Todd, and Leila Abu El Hawa of the Post-Apocalyptic Book Club and Dark Societies. We’ll be chaired by Una McCormack, best-selling SF author, academic and lecturer.

Here’s what the lovely folk who organise WOW have to say about the panel:

From the The Handmaid’s Tale to The Power and The Hunger Games to Noughts & Crosses, women’s writing has drawn on history to imagine different futures in sci-fi and fantasy writing. With grim comparisons being drawn with dystopian fiction and our current political climate, and as technology and science begin to make what seemed impossible a reality, what can speculative fiction tell us about our world today? On the bicentenary of the publication of Frankenstein – written by a 19 year old Mary Shelley in 1818 and often called the first true work of science fiction– we talk to the women who rule sci-fi and fantasy right now to help us imagine a gender equal world.

I’d love to tell you to go buy tickets, but they’re already sold out! If you were quick enough to get yourself a Saturday or weekend pass, please join us in the Level 4 Blue Bar from 13.15-14.15. If not – well, I was on another standing-room-only WOW panel in 2015 which the festival recorded and posted online very shortly afterwards. Hopefully they’ll do the same again.