Manchester Literature Festival

Friday 11 October 2024 

Poets performing at this one-off Manchester celebration include: 2019 Cholmondeley Award Malika Booker, founder of The Midnight Run Inua Ellams, Portico Prize nominee Ian Humphreys, UK LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate Adam Lowe and poet, translator, farmer, maker and martial artist Eileen Pun among others. 

Venue: Contact Theatre, Manchester
Time: 19:00
Tickets: £14 / £10
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Performer Biographies

A British poet of Guyanese–Grenadian heritage, Malika Booker is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. Her pamphlet Breadfruit (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize and the 2014 Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for first full collection. A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the 2019 Cholmondeley Award for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022). She won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2020 and in 2023 with her poem ‘Libation’.  

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright & performer, graphic artist & designer and founder of: The Midnight Run (an arts-filled, night-time, urban walking experience.); The Rhythm and Poetry Party (The R.A.P Party) which celebrates poetry & hip hop; and Poetry + Film / Hack (P+F/H) which celebrates Poetry and Film. Identity, Displacement & Destiny are recurring themes in his work, where he tries to mix the old with the new: traditional African oral storytelling with contemporary poetics, paint with pixel, texture with vector. His books are published by Flipped Eye, Akashic, Nine Arches, Penned In The Margins, Oberon & Methuen.  

Ian Humphreys’ latest poetry collection, Tormentil (Nine Arches Press) won a Royal Society of Literature ‘Literature Matters’ Award while in progress. His debut, Zebra (Nine Arches) was nominated for the Portico Prize. Ian was Writer in Residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (2023/24) and is the editor of No Net Ensnares Me: An anthology of prose poetry inspired by the Brontës and the wild (Calder Valley Poetry). He is the editor of Why I Write Poetry and the co-editor of After Sylvia: Poems and essays in celebration of Sylvia Plath (both from Nine Arches). His work has been highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry and he has written for the BBC. 

Adam Lowe (he/his, mostly) is a writer of British, Irish and Black Caribbean heritage. He is the UK’s LGBT+ History Month Poet Laureate and was Yorkshire’s Poet for 2012. When not writing, he performs in drag as Beyonce Holes. Adam is a graduate of The Complete Works, Obsidian and Inscribe. His debut Patterflash (Peepal Tree Press, 2023) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, acclaimed by The Big Issue and featured on BBC radio. See adam-lowe.com  

Eileen Pun is as poet, translator, farmer, maker and martial artist based between Cumbria, UK and Abruzzo, Italy. She considers her approach to poetry as an experiential ecosystem: living, integrative, interdisciplinary & international, working between the themes of movement, nature, the meditative space, permaculture and self-sufficiency. Recent work can be found in Mapping The Future (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) and in performance, ‘Longways / Crosswise’ (2019) funded by the Morecambe Bay Partnership Trust and Heritage Lottery.

British Library, London

Friday 25 October 2024 

Artists performing at this one-off London celebration are: prize-winning poets Mona Arshi, Nick Makoha and Yomi Ṣode, poet and translator Will Harris and Fulbright scholar and Royal Society of Literature Fellow Karen McCarthy-Woolf, with appearances by The Complete Works founder Bernardine Evaristo and director Dr Nathalie Teitler. 

Venue: British Library Piggott Theatre and online
Time: 19:00
Tickets: £10 / £8.50 / £5
Buy tickets here >

Performer biographies

Mona Arshi is a poet, novelist and essayist. Mona trained as a human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry which she studied at the University of East Anglia. Her debut collection Small Hands won the 2015 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She has also been a prize winner in the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester creative writing competitions. 

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of ten books and numerous other works including the 2019 Booker-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other. She has set up many literature inclusion projects for writers and is the curator of the Black Britain: Writing Back book series for Penguin, re-publishing thirteen books by Black British authors since 2020. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books Rendang (2020) and Brother Poem (2023). He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan and Nisha Ramayya, was published earlier this year by Monitor Books. 

London-based Nick Makoha is a Malika’s Kitchen Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. His debut poetry book Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. Born in Uganda, Nick fled with his mother as a result of the political overtones that arose from the civil war during the Idi Amin dictatorship. He has lived in Kenya and Saudi Arabia.  

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf is the author of three poetry collections, the ‘extraordinarily inventive’ (Bernardine Evaristo) verse novel Top Doll, and editor of seven literary anthologies. A Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she was artist in residence at the Sacatar Institute, Brazil in 2021, researching sugar and its intimate ecological legacies. Her poems have been translated into various European languages and exhibited by Poems on the Underground. 

Yomi Ṣode is an award-winning Nigerian-British writer. His debut collection Manorism was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023 and the T S Eliot Prize 2022. Yomi is a Complete Works alumnus and a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen. He is the founder of BoxedIn, First Five, The Daddy Diaries and the mentorship programme 12 in 12. 

Dr Nathalie Teitler HonFRSL has promoted diversity in UK literature for thirty years. She was the director of the Complete Works Poetry, an initiative of literary activist and Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo. She co-founded the James Berry Poetry Prize for poets of colour (with Bloodaxe and Newcastle University), and is also co-founder and Director of Un Nuevo Sol, an organisation building a community of Latinx writers in the UK and beyond. She has edited several anthologies and journals and is writing her first novel Crossings, centred around tango dance and the world of Buenos Aires in 1900.