Francesca Beard

Francesca Beard was born in Malaysia and grew up on an island balanced on the equator, surrounded by eagles, lizards, cobras and a fighting cockerel for a guard dog. Her best friend was Fluffy, a smooth-haired mongrel. After a spell in real jobs, she gave it all up and now exists as a London-based poet who has been called ‘the Queen of British performance poetry’ (London Metro) and ‘spine-tingling’ (The Independent). She has performed her poetry in places all over the world, from a shopping mall in the Bangkok Book Fair to a prison in Colombia and New York’s Nuyorican Café. She’s run creative writing workshops with the British Council, The Young Vic, The BBC, The Barbican, Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, The Natural History Museum and many more.

http://francescabeard.com/site/index.php

John Hegley

Mr Hegley was born in Newington Green, North London and was educated in Luton, Bristol and Bradford University. His first public performance monies came from busking his songs, initially outside a shoe shop in Hull in the late seventies. He performed on the streets of London in the early eighties, fronting the Popticians, with whom he also recorded two sessions for John Peel, and has since been a frequent performer of his words, sung and spoken, on both local and national radio.

He has produced ten books of verse and prose pieces, two CDs and one mug, but his largest source of income is from stages on his native island. An Edinburgh Festival regular, he is noted for his exploration of such diverse topics as dog hair, potatoes, handkerchiefs and the misery of human existence.

https://www.johnhegley.co.uk/

Selina Nwulu

Selina Nwulu is a writer, poet and essayist based in London. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-6, a prestigious award that recognises talent and potential in the capital.  Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip was published by Burning Eye Books in September 2015 and was a Poetry Book Society (PBS) recommendation. She also writes for a number of online outlets such as the Guardian, Free Word and Red Pepper.

Selina has toured nationally with Apples and Snakes, representing London as part of the Public Address II tour, as well as more widely at a number of festivals including Glastonbury, Edinburgh Fringe, Cúirt Festival in Galway and Fiery Tongues Festival in Ruigoord, Holland. She has also taken part in a literary tour in India with the British Council. She was Writer and Creator in Residence at the Free Word centre and Wellcome Trust, looking creatively at food and how it connects to our health and matters of social justice.

http://www.selinanwulu.com/

Midori Jaeger

Midori Jaeger is a cellist, singer and songwriter who performs in the realms of folk, classical, jazz, world music, and free improvisation. Midori graduated with Distinction from the Masters course in Cello at the Royal Academy of Music in 2016 and has performed in Macbeth and King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe, tours as the cellist and backing vocalist for Heather Nova, and gigs regularly in London and abroad with many artists including Ex:Re, Shammi Pithia, Cherise Adams-Burnett and Daisy Chute. Midori is a regular session musician and can be heard playing cello and keyboards on Heather Nova’s upcoming album Pearl, playing cello for Joseph Lawrence & The Garden, and as a cellist for Glass Animals. Midori’s album of experimental ambient cello music, co-written with British record producer ‘Youth’, will be released in September 2019 on Painted Word Records and her debut EP of original songs with her four-piece band is due for release in Summer 2019. 

Anthony Joseph

Anthony Joseph is a Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of four poetry collections and three novels, The African Origins of UFOs, Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon and The Frequency of Magic (forthcoming in October 2019). Kitch has been shortlisted for The 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize, the OCM Bocas Fiction Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. As a musician he has released seven critically acclaimed albums. The most recent, People of the Sun, was recorded in Trinidad and released in 2018. In the same year, he curated ‘Windrush: A Celebration’, a series of five events which reconsidered and celebrated the literary and musical legacies of the Windrush generation, culminating in a gala concert at the Barbican as part of the London Jazz Festival. In 2019 he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. He lectures in literature, critical theory and creative writing at De Montfort University, Leicester. He lives in London

Sarah Sayeed

Sarah Sayeed is a musical artist whose practice focuses around contemporary works that have influence from Western classical choral works, orchestral ideas, Indian and Bengali classical vocals & instrumental works and Western contemporary jazz and urban music. Sarah plays tanpura, shruti and swarmandal, and is the lead vocalist in international duet Myth of Her with violinst and electronic artist Anne Eltard (Copenhagen, Denmark). She is currently training in classical vocals with leading Classical Indian Music maestro Swati Natekar.

Credits include Principle Musician in Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe (2019), Composer & Musical Director for the Royal Shakespeare Company adaption of Moliere’s Tartuffe (2019/2018) and Sound Designer for Contact Theatre’s production on Suffragette Movement, She Bangs The Drums (2018) 

Artistic commissions include: Sound and Music‘s Portfolio composers programme and Curating Sound Travels with the British Music collection/ Google Curate.

Sarah has developed key projects such as  Sufi in the City with The Whitworth and New Art Exchange where Sarah is Experimentor associate artist. Her performances include Manchester International Festival, Brighton Fringe, Cargo, Queen Elizabeth Hall & Nottingham Mela.