Kendal’s arts hub dishes up a healthy side of literature alongside its craft pizzas and cult flicks. There’s the annual Lakes International Comic Art Festival (LICAF), Ann Grant’s monthly spoken word night Verbalise with open mic slots plus an invited guest (last Saturday of the month except August and December), and a Brewery Poets showcase twice a year. BP co-founder Kim Moore co-ran Kendal Poetry Festival with Clare Shaw, welcoming TS Eliot Prize-winner Joelle Taylor and Imtiaz Dharker in 2022.

Incorporating Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s first family home, the expanded Wordsworth Museum now goes by the name of Wordsworth Grasmere, and houses an unsurpassed collection of the Wordsworths’ letters, journals and poems, objects, maps and pictures, and interactive displays alongside a busy exhibitions programme. The Wordsworth Trust is not only a shrine to the poetry of the past but also a centre for creating poetry, with residencies filled by the likes of Zaffar Kunial, Harry Man and Helen Mort. There’s a programme of events includes readings, talks and workshops, while informal creative writing group the Dove Cottage Poets meets here once a month and the Dove Cottage Young Poets meet fortnightly to read, discuss and write poetry with contemporary poet Kim Moore. While you’re in Grasmere, seek out Sam Read, a small independent bookshop that has sat looking over the village green since 1887.

Pleasant as it is with its Pre-Raphaelite paintings and pretty planted courtyard garden, Tullie House in the centre of Carlisle is also a literature lover’s go-to when the annual Borderlines Book Festival is on in October. Previous guest speakers have included Jenn Ashworth and Andrew Michael Hurley, while Kate Fox and Anita Sethi were among the writers who appeared in 2022. While you’re in town, be sure to head down the road to Borderlines partner Bookends Carlisle – this independent bookshop stocks 20,000 new titles, and runs a busy events programme with visiting authors, regular poetry and reading groups, and a weekly storytime. Bookcase, meanwhile, is your go-to for secondhand goodies.

You might head to National Trust property Acorn Bank, east of Penrith, for its woodland walks, working watermill and wildlife, but don’t leave without hitting the second-hand bookshop on the ground floor, next to the grand Entrance Hall, to your right as you enter the main doors. The shelves are stocked full of exciting reads, with a wide range of fiction, non-fiction (including cookery books) and children’s books. The second-hand bookshop is run by a group of dedicated volunteers, and your new page-turner will help the team to look after this special place.

The annual Words By The Water festival of words and ideas popped up at the theatre on the shores of Derwentwater every March for over a week, although 2023’s was shelved. Still, there’s much to attract the booklover, not least a small version of Keswick and Carlisle-based Bookends bookshop – the OG on Main Street is jam-packed with the new titles and remainder books, along with an impressive selection of Lake District and Cumbrian titles.

Not to be confused with the other Old Fire Station (Carlisle), the one in Penrith is run by Eden Arts, an artist-led organisation that puts on various annual events including the famous Picnic Cinema screening of Withnail & I at Uncle Monty’s actual cottage! Eden Arts recently collaborated with Belgium’s Captain Boomer Collective on the whale street art project in Whitehaven, West Cumbria, and Redcar on the East coast, documented in a series of short short stories by the writer David Gaffney and poems by Carmen Marcus.

When not hosting touring musicians and a regular Comedy Store night, Carlisle Old Fire Station has been known to run live literature events, and poetry films by Katie Hale for the National Trust’s Tables Turned project were shown here as part of the Under Northern Skies exhibition.