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Feminist Book Fortnight (FBF), coordinated by Books on the Rise and running from 14th–28th May, is an annual bookseller-led celebration of feminist and radical books across independent bookshops in the UK. It is a space for conversation, curiosity, solidarity, and the many different voices and experiences that feminism holds.
Books have always helped us to imagine fairer worlds and to better understand one another’s lives. They can challenge, comfort, provoke, and connect us across borders and generations.
But FBF is not only a celebration of feminist literature - it is also a reminder of why feminism remains necessary. Women’s rights are still being negotiated, contested, and in many places, actively stripped away.
We think of women’s lives in Afghanistan, where education, movement, and basic autonomy have been stripped away, and in Sudan where women and girls are fleeing war while carrying the burden of sustaining families, protecting children, and securing food and water amid collapsing services and insecurity. In other parts of the world, safety is still conditional, parity feels distant, and equality remains aspirational rather than real. And we think of how quickly distant crises slip from view when they are no longer in the headlines or daily focus.
It might be tempting, from the relative safety of life in the UK, to speak of feminism in the past tense, as though the struggle has largely been won. But we haven’t got there yet - not while pay gaps persist, not while political representation remains unequal, not while women still make daily calculations about safety, autonomy, and whose voices are heard. Equality is not a finished story, and the freedoms many of us take for granted remain fragile, unevenly distributed, and too easily reversed.
Let this fortnight be both a celebration and a reminder that there is still much to do to achieve equality. Books can help to guide and galvanise us; when we open ourselves to them, they can become a call to action and a way of imagining meaningful change.
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
By Maya Angelou
Read the full poem here.
Further reading and resources:
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We recommend author Rebecca Solnit's recent article The One Thing Everyone Gets Wrong About Feminism, where she writes with characteristic clarity about why feminism is far from finished. Her new book, The Beginning Comes After the End is also a fantastic read.
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The Poetry Foundation's Poetry and Feminism page is a great resource for discovering feminist poems and poets.
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In York this June, the Make Space (for girls) Festival encourages girls to use public spaces, and try new things. Free events include sport, arts, creative writing, wellbeing, photography and more, plus a drop-in ‘Poetry Print Map’ workshop on 14th June.
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Our Patent Remedies for Patriarchy bookshop.org shelf contains our most recommended feminist non-fiction and poetry anthologies: books prescribed to embolden, awaken, and fortify; to nourish independent thought, creative freedom, and collective courage.
 Our Becoming section is home to many literary treasures designed to encourage confidence and empowerment, and becoming ourselves in the world. We particularly love She is Fierce and Such a Sweet Singing: poetry anthologies that bring together work by women poets across different eras and voices, from well-known writers to newer names, offering poems that move through everyday life, love, nature, motherhood, loss, and resistance with clarity and emotional directness.  Thank you to our booksellers in Oxford Street and York for putting together in store displays to celebrate Feminist Book Fortnight!
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