Join Ammar Kalia, Emma Warren, and André Marmot for an evening of conversation as they discuss their latest books, exploring music, culture, and the stories that shape our creative worlds.

Ammar Kalia is a writer and musician. He is the Guardian’s Global Music Critic and regularly writes for other publications including the Observer, Downbeat, Crack Magazine, Jazzwise, Resident Advisor and Apple Music. His debut novel, A Person Is A Prayer, was released in 2024, he has an essay in the 2021 collection Haramacy and his poetry collection and accompanying album, Kintsugi: Jazz Poems for Musicians Alive and Dead, was released in 2020. He is currently working on a second novel and a non-fiction book on music.

On A Person Is A Prayer

Told on three individual days in 1955, 1994 and 2019, A Person Is A Prayer is the story of the Bedi family and their migration from India to Kenya to England. Opening on an arranged marriage and the decision to leave home in search of a better future, the novel examines how the decisions that make a life might ripple through successive generations, from yearning for a sense of belonging in foreign lands to grieving the past and those we have lost along the way. A Person Is A Prayer is Ammar Kalia's debut novel and was a pick of 2024 in Vogue, Esquire, GQ, i-D and Dazed.

Emma Warren is an author, music journalist and broadcaster. Warren was a founding contributor to cult music magazine Jockey Slut and worked at The Face during the 1990s. Her book, Dance Your Way Home, published in March 2023 by Faber, traces a social history of the dancefloor. The number of nightclubs in the UK has nearly halved since 2010, a result of escalating rents, withdrawn late-night licences, and a general trend towards the privatisation of public space. In her book, Warren explores the historic function dance has played in activating community, its uneasy relationship with authority and its therapeutic potential.

Dance Your Way Home

Emma Warren takes readers on a richly textured journey across dancefloors — from kitchens and discos, to Irish dancehalls and jungle raves — weaving together memoir, cultural history and personal reflection to explore what dancing tells us about being human and part of a collective. With characteristic empathy and sharp insight she shows how dance can be a means of communication, of healing and belonging, rather than just night-out escapism. 

Her latest book, Up the Youth Club, shifts focus from the dancefloor to the spaces that have shaped youth culture in the UK and Northern Ireland: the now-scarce youth clubs, built for young people to meet, create and move, which have quietly powered music, art, community and identity for decades. Together, the two works reflect Warren’s commitment to unearthing the overlooked places — a club in a corner, a youth club in a neighbourhood — where culture really happens.

André Marmot is an agent at Earth Agency in London, specialising in the common ground between African, jazz and global electronic music. Active professionally in music since 2007 as agent, musician, promoter and label owner, André believes passionately in the power of music to connect people across cultural and social boundaries. Unapologetic Expression is his debut book.

Unapologetic Expression: The Inside Story of the UK Jazz Explosion

For many in the nineties, jazz was viewed as an obsolete, uncool music, a genre loved by out of touch white men with deeply questionable taste. And yet, by 2019, a new generation of UK jazz musicians were selling out major venues and appearing on festivals line ups around the world. How has UK jazz regenerated its image so totally in twenty-five years? And how did it ever become uncool in the first place?

Reaching back to the roots of jazz as the ‘unapologetic expression’ of oppressed peoples, shaped by the forces of slavery, imperialism and globalisation, Andre´ Marmot places this new wave within the wider context of a divided, postcolonial Britain navigating its identity in a new world order. These artists have crafted a sound which reflects the nation as it is today – a sound connected to the very origins of jazz itself.

Please note The Jazz Social is a pop-up venue with mixed standing / seated. Limited seating operates on a first come first serve basis with no reservations. For more information on accessibility access head to the bottom of The Jazz Social page.