A Writer's Guide to Brighton

Jubilee Library is the main library for Brighton & Hove, spread over three floors. A lift serves the upper floor and mezzanine, which hold the rare books and special collections; the conference rooms and the Business and IP Centre are up there too. Like every public library in the city, it closes on bank holidays.

Hove Library is on Church Road. Non-fiction, the rare books and special collections, and a meeting room are on the upper floor, which has a lift.

The University of Sussex runs The Keep with East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove City Council, and the university's Special Collections sit there beside its partners' archives. Writers come for the literary papers of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and of Rudyard Kipling, and for the Mass Observation Archive of everyday life in Britain since 1937. Anyone can use it. The Reference Room needs no booking. It is about a ten-minute walk from Falmer station and closes on Sundays and Mondays.

Members of the public can apply for External Reference membership at the Sussex library, online or at the Service Desk. It covers the building and the print collections; for loans, take out the paid External Borrowing membership. Allow up to three working days for the card. During the May assessment period, reference members can get in only on weekday evenings after 6pm and at weekends.

Kemptown Bookshop has passed its 50th anniversary. It sells signed editions and children's books alongside general titles, and writers can join its co-working sessions or the monthly 5am Writing Club. Launches and book clubs fill out the calendar. It opens daily.

Paul and Inge Sweetman founded City Books and still run it. It is a general bookshop on two floors with an extensive local-interest section, and it has twice been shortlisted for the national Independent Bookshop of the Year. Mary Beard and Caitlin Moran have spoken at its literary evenings.

This is the Brighton branch of Goldsboro Books, an independent that specialises in signed first-edition hardbacks. Collectors will find exclusive editions here. Goldsboro also runs subscription memberships, and two of them, PREM1ER and Crime Collective, each have a monthly pick.

PLATF9RM's coworking floors are on the fifth and sixth storeys of Tower Point on North Road. Book a day pass or a trial day online.

PLATF9RM also runs coworking inside Hove Town Hall, on the same road as Hove Library. The Grounds, a café with coworking and an events space, shares the site. Day passes book online.

Plus X is an innovation hub on Lewes Road with coworking and breakout areas, and its memberships include hot desks and day passes. Cafe Domenica is on site. A tour comes with a coworking day.

Bom-Bane's is a licensed café-restaurant serving homely Belgian and European food, with nights of film, music and puppetry. It has won a 3Weeks Brighton Fringe Best Venue award and an Edinburgh Festival Spirit of the Fringe Award. It opens Thursday to Saturday evenings. Book, and pre-order your food.

The Brunswick is a Hove pub with two professional live stages and a rotating kitchen-in-residence.

Komedia puts on comedy and cabaret with food and drink, and it runs brunch events.

Redroaster's café at Brighton Dome wraps around the Corn Exchange and Studio Theatre, and its terraces overlook the Royal Pavilion Gardens. Redroaster roasts its coffee in Brighton.

New Writing South is a charity supporting writers in the South East, with its registered office in Brighton. Its focus is writers under-represented in mainstream publishing and theatre. It runs First Tuesday Writers sessions and Write Process writing groups, along with self-paced creative writing courses and a playwrights' cohort, and its industry days cover publishing and playwriting. Writers' resources and opportunities listings are on its site.

The Coast Is Queer is an LGBTQ+ literature festival presented by New Writing South with Marlborough Productions at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts. Authors and poets share the programme with performers and activists. Writers can sign up for its workshops.

Independent Brighton bookshops founded this grassroots festival to make marginalised voices mainstream. Its programme runs from author events to a Big Read and a family strand. Authors can submit to appear.

Status Flo is a spoken word night in the Brighton Dome Studio Theatre, hosted and co-programmed by the Brighton poet known as AFLO. Each night pairs a featured poet with new local talent and guests from across the UK. Some editions are themed, such as its LGBTQ+ History Month special.

Founded in 1999, the centre studies life narrative across media, genre, period and purpose. Biographers and memoirists can follow its research projects and publications.

The Sussex Humanities Lab investigates how computational technology interacts with culture, society and environment. Its programme includes digital methods workshops and research forums, along with sessions of critical and creative making. It also offers routes for research collaboration.

The Design Archives cover twentieth-century design in Britain and global design organisations, among them the Design Council and ICOGRADA. Their holdings include the archives of Theo Crosby and Barbara Jones. Scholars from many disciplines use them, and the catalogue descriptions are on Archives Hub.

Waterloo Press is a poetry publisher in Hove. Its list runs from lost modernist classics and translations of senior international poets to collections by young British poets.

The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies publishes original empirical and theoretical research on migration and its consequences, along with work on ethnic conflict, discrimination and racism, nationalism, and citizenship and integration policy. It is edited from the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex, in Falmer. Preparing an article for the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

Project Grants is Arts Council England's open-access programme for arts, libraries and museums projects. Individual practitioners can apply, and so can community and cultural organisations.

The Royal Literary Fund makes grants to professional writers in the UK who face financial difficulty through illness, disability, age or changed circumstances. Its paid Fellowships place writers in UK universities to help students with academic writing.

New Writing South keeps free or discounted places on most of its events, and on every workshop and short course, for writers facing barriers to their careers. That includes writers from under-represented communities, isolated or unemployed writers, and writers with long-term illness or disability. With The Literary Consultancy, the charity also takes part in the TLC Free Reads scheme of manuscript assessments for low-income writers in England.

bip-Art is an open-access printmaking studio with a membership. Its courses take beginners through to advanced printmakers in etching, hand-drawn lithography, and woodcut and linocut. Monoprint, collagraph and mokulito are taught too.

The Resource Centre is a charity whose print room is open to community groups in Sussex. Groups use its self-service printing in black and white or colour. The booklet maker collates, folds and staples newsletters and zines, and a fuller printing service has an online quote calculator. It closes on Wednesdays and at weekends.