At Fisga Warehouse, there is a book club (in English) that started out as nothing more than a winter retreat but quickly grew into a small community. When Liyana Balkanska arrived at Fisga in September 2024, the venue’s cultural programme consisted mainly of concerts and performances, but the team realised that, “during the colder months, people were looking for cosier events”.

The idea for the club came about by chance: “one of our colleagues mentioned that she loved taking part in book clubs, because it was a way to meet new people; as I love reading and am an expat, I thought it would be a community I’d like to create and run, whilst bringing a more intimate and welcoming element to Fisga’s cultural programme,” Liyana tells Agenda Porto.

The project was initially called Plot Season and was conceived as “a series of meetings”. “However, as the community grew, it became clear that people wanted to continue throughout the year, and the team eventually named it The Book Club,” she explains.

The growth was so impressive that, at the start, there were “four or five people at the sessions; after six months, there were already around 50, and today there are over 140 members”.

The selection of titles follows this diverse approach. “So far, we’ve explored both classics and contemporary literature.” Recently, they read Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, and in recent months they’ve discussed books such as Blindness, Pachinko and Little Women. In March, for the first time, they read a graphic novel, Watchmen, “in a special session”, she notes.

To facilitate conversation among participants, the Fisga team created Book Cards, a card game in which each card poses general questions that can apply to almost any book — “Did the book change your mind about anything?” or “Which character do you identify with most?” — and which serve as entry points into a broader dialogue. “They’re especially useful when the group is large, because they allow participants to be split into smaller groups and give everyone space to share their ideas,” explains Liyana.

The young woman notes that the Book Club attracts people who “are looking for spaces that focus more on human relationships”. “Here, people find an environment where they feel comfortable, welcome and, we hope, looked after. The focus is less on formal literary analysis and more on meaningful conversation and the shared experience that comes from a love of reading,” she explains.

As Heróides – the feminist book club is a project centred on reading, discussion and conversation about books, with monthly meetings that bring together hundreds of people online, as well as featuring some in-person sessions. The challenge is “to read one book a month, and on the last Saturday of each month, a book club meeting is held via Zoom”.

Created in 2021 within Cassandra, this club emerged “after almost a year of successive lockdowns”. “Whilst, on the one hand, for some people this was a time when they were able to resume their reading habits, on the other, most of them had no one to talk to about what they were reading. So, the Heroides arose from a desire to meet other people to talk about books, and, through them, to discover new ways of looking at the world,” says Sara Barros Leitão, artistic director of Cassandra.

It was only in January this year, six years after its creation, that the book that gave the club its name, Ovid’s Heroides, was read for the first time; it consists of “a collection of letters signed solely by women (most of them fictional and mythological characters)”. “Although we recognise in Ovid a gesture that was disruptive in his time — that of giving women a voice — he is still a man writing. That is why we have appropriated the name of his book to take and claim that voice for ourselves and to read, fundamentally, women writers who write their own stories,” Sara explains to Agenda Porto.

A dialogue between cinema and literature

The Batalha Reading Club, now in its fourth year, is based on the premise that “films have the power to transform our relationship with the written word, and vice versa”. “The reading club is an integral part of Batalha’s mission, since it opened, to establish itself as a community cultural centre, where film screenings engage in dialogue with other forms of social interaction centred on cultural expressions without which cinema could not exist: writing is undoubtedly one of them,” the institution’s artistic director, Guilherme Blanc, tells Agenda Porto.

Through films featured in this cinema centre’s programme, the aim is the joint reading and analysis of novels, short stories, plays, poems or essays; for this edition, Gabriela do Amaral, poet, writer and designer, and Rui Manuel Amaral, writer and editor, have been invited as coordinators.

According to Rui Manuel Amaral, an experienced organiser of book-related events at venues such as Gato Vadio and Térmita, the aim of these sessions is “to read and discuss texts that serve as reading guides for some of the films in the Batalha programme, though not exclusively; texts of all genres, including those that do not belong to any genre”.

For the April session, Rui and Gabriela will draw inspiration from the ethnographic documentary Máscaras (1976) by Portuguese filmmaker Noémia Delgado, which will be screened at Batalha on 10 and 15 April. “But the theme is merely a starting point to open up the discussion,” he emphasises.

Season after season, the Batalha Reading Club has grown and created, as Guilherme Blanc puts it, “a close-knit and growing community”. This year, due to demand, two groups have been formed, between which the 70 registered participants are divided.

Rui explains that, at the first session, he asked the participants why they had signed up, and “a good number said they were coming because they worked from home, and this was a chance to get out and be with other people”. “I thought it was extraordinary that the excuse was literature,” he exclaims. “It strikes me as a great revolution that people today leave their homes to meet up and read together. Honestly, I think that’s what it is—a revolution,” adds Gabriela.

“Literature is meant to be enjoyed, and if we can achieve that, even just a little bit – just as much as listening to music or watching a film – that’s wonderful!” concludes Rui.

It was precisely at the Batalha Book Club that, in 2024, Cristiana Rodrigues’ passion for group reading took on a whole new dimension. “I was looking for a club that would inspire me to become the avid reader I had been in my childhood and teenage years again. I tried a few clubs that I didn’t connect with and found others that were online. I wanted the chance to discuss things face to face, to share and hear different opinions, and that’s exactly what I found at the Batalha Reading Club,” the founder of the Picnic Book Club tells Agenda Porto. As this club operates on a seasonal basis, when it ended, Cristiana felt “a certain emptiness” and therefore decided to set up her own literary club.

Thus was born the Picnic Book Club, which combines literature, socialising and critical thinking in an informal setting — often in picnic style — and with an avowedly feminist identity. What sets this book club apart, she emphasises, is “the focus on feminist themes and social issues”. The meetings start with the books, but rarely stop there: “usually, we always take the book’s theme and apply it to our own reality”, in a process that opens the door to more in-depth and nuanced discussions.

For Cristiana Rodrigues, reading is anything but neutral. “I believe that reading is inherently political and that the choice of books we read should be a conscious one,” she says, whilst rejecting any rigid hierarchy between literary genres. At the club, they read everything — from novels to plays — provided the texts raise social issues. It is this aspect that, in her view, underpins the richness of the conversations: “because we feel represented or empathise with the problems portrayed, because it makes us question our perspective on the world”.

According to Cristiana, the selection process combines online reviews – “from both literary critics and ordinary internet readers” – with suggestions from the members themselves, in an open and collaborative curation process. They seek out books with depth, capable of “raising questions or offering less familiar perspectives”, balancing Portuguese and foreign authors wherever possible.

As it operates in person, the book club is not currently accepting any more members “to ensure the smooth running of the meetings”. However, a registration form is available where those interested can join a waiting list to be contacted when places become available.

“I think coming together as a community is very important, which is precisely why I wanted the club to be in-person. This human contact and face-to-face exchange of views adds so much,” she emphasises. “Several members, including myself, have already made friends through the club, which I believe would be more difficult online,” says Cristiana.

It is one of Porto’s newest reading clubs: inspired by Eugénio Andrade’s verse, ‘Poetry loves to walk barefoot’, a space dedicated to those who wish to experience poetry up close, without fear or formality, was launched at the end of February at the Eugénio de Andrade Poetry Library.

Carla Teixeira and Maria Adelaide Silva are in charge of this weekly gathering, which takes place on Wednesdays between 3pm and 4pm, with the aim of revitalising the country’s only library specialising in contemporary poetry.

“As this is a house of poetry, we had the idea of creating a club that, at its core, would reflect the collection we have in the library,” says Carla Teixeira, librarian at the Almeida Municipal Garrett Library and coordinator of the school library support service. “We want to encourage critical thinking and debate and foster a connection between the participants and this space.”

Sophia de Mello Breyner, Vasco Graça Moura, Eugénio de Andrade, Rosa Alice Branco, Manuel António Pina, Miguel Torga, Maria do Rosário Pedreira and Nuno Júdice are some of the poets who have taken part or will take part in the club’s sessions, which aim to be “a space to explore, discuss and share the world of words in a relaxed and informal setting, whether through the reading and analysis of poems by renowned authors or through reflection on universal themes”.

“We’re not in a classroom. The idea is for people to feel free to share, to discover the poet who speaks to them, who resonates with them,” says Maria Adelaide. “People don’t come here to sleep; they go to church,” she laughs. For this facilitator, the challenge is to make poetry accessible: “People often find it hard to get into poetry. We want to show them that poems contain messages and snippets of our lives.”

The target audience is broad, “from 16 years old and up”, although most of the current participants are senior citizens. Entry is free, requiring only registration via the Porto Libraries website. But even if they haven’t registered, those who are interested or simply curious can turn up because the club always operates on an open-door basis – an invitation to walk barefoot through the universe of poetry.

Literacidades was launched in 2019 on social media as a literary promotion project that began by linking books to places, particularly in Porto, and which quickly became one of the most followed Portuguese accounts dedicated to reading. Today, it runs an online and in-person book club, with monthly sessions dedicated primarily to books by Portuguese-language authors, held in various venues across the city of Porto and its surroundings.

Álvaro Curia and Ludgero Cardoso, both affiliated with the University of Porto, began with “this simple premise” of writing short reviews of books they had just read, then photographing them in a location around the city. But with the pandemic, “the focus shifted”: Covid-19 “sent them home” and they thought of ways to reinvent the project, notably through live conversations with authors, “for a few hours on Sunday afternoons”, as they tell Agenda Porto. José Luís Peixoto, Valter Hugo Mãe and Dulce Maria Cardoso were some of their guests, as they now recall. At the same time, they were receiving an increasing number of requests from followers for reading suggestions. “Literacidades grew and became a project [that went] far beyond sharing opinions on books.”

It was in December 2024 that they set up the book club “to bring the online world into the real world” and “to promote literature in the Portuguese language”. Both believe that, although more and more Portuguese-language authors are being published in Portugal, they still have “little space on the bookshelves”. “Our aim with this club is to read books by living Portuguese-language authors, whether they are Portuguese, Brazilian, Mozambican, Angolan… there are many little-known authors who deserve to be read,” they argue, listing names such as Ana Teresa Pereira, Hélder Gomes Cancela, Mariana Salomão Carrara and Vítor Vidal.