Birmingham’s own Verve Festival of Poetry and Spoken Word is back at Birmingham Hippodrome!
Now in its seventh year, Verve has become synonymous with a lively and celebratory approach to programming poetry of every different kind.
Whether it be raucous performance poetry events, quiet reading events, studious workshops, mind-blowing dramatic poetry, collaborative work or open mic poetry – the programme encourages audiences to see their favourite poets and to try something new – to join in, create, listen and learn.
New to poetry or an old hand, there’s something for everyone to enjoy at VERVE!
There are three types of pass available for the festival.
Festival Pass
Includes entry to all events throughout the festival (excluding workshops).
£50 (concessions £35)
Saturday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sat 19 Feb (excluding workshops).
£30 (concessions £22.50)
Sunday Pass
Includes entry to all events on Sun 20 Feb (excluding workshops).
£25 (concessions £18.50)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Verve Birmingham Schools Slam Final
Wed 21 Feb, 7 – 9pm, Patrick Studio
Opening #VERVE2024 is our third Birmingham Schools Slam Final!
Verve have invited twelve local Primary Schools to bring a team of their best poets to this exciting competition hosted and facilitated by Brummie gem and VERVE Poetry Press poet Giovanni ‘Spoz’ Esposito! But there’s more! Their judges will consist of two local poets well versed (get it!) in the art of poetry – Birmingham Poet Laureate Jasmine Gardosi and Birmingham Young Poet Laureate Iona Mandal. Both poets will deliver a short and entertaining set of their work and act as judges.
Come and support the poetry stars of the future through their first ever poetry slam!
Tickets £6
VERVE Birmingham Schools Slam Final Stream to Screen
Wed 21 Feb, 7 – 9pm, Studio 4
Our above event in the Patrick studio is now sold out. But you can still watch with this ticket to our Stream to Screen event in a nearby room and enjoy all the fun, and be there to give you kids a big hug afterwards.
Tickets £3
Tyrone Lewis Workshop: Refine your poetry craft and amplify your voice
Thu 22 Feb, 4.30 – 6.30pm, Workshop Room 1
Join the dynamic Tyrone Lewis, renowned UK Poetry Slam Champion and author of ‘Blackish’ and ‘2 Black 2 Furious,’ for an electrifying Performance Workshop. Develop your creative potential as Tyrone shares insights into performance poetry, spoken word themes and slam techniques, guiding your personal narrative through spoken word.
Dive into the art of spoken word as Tyrone shares his expertise, drawing from his remarkable journey as the Roundhouse Poetry Slam and Axis Poetry Slam Champion. You’ll learn various poetic techniques, explore diverse forms, and receive constructive feedback to hone your craft.
This 2 hour session revolves around the exploration of writing for the purpose of performance, featuring tips from the slam poetry maestro himself.
Tickets £16.50 (concessions £12.50)
Run Your Power-try To The Music: VERVE’s EMPOWERING Live Poetry Night Celebration
Thu 22 Feb, 7.30 – 10pm, Patrick Studio
Join Verve for an explosive evening as they present four poetry nights amplifying the spoken word community of BHX. Meet the hosts, hear their stories and experience their nights with headline acts, open mic, and live music.
Tell It To The Music – Poetry Jam – Hosted by Bromantic and Vato, this event blends spoken word with live jazz, creating an unforgettable fusion of words and music.
Empower Poetry – Spoken Word Night – Serving the local community with a stage for humble Spoken Word, “Empower Poetry” features profound Griot Gabriel as the headline act.
The Poetry Hotel – Discover emerging poets Bradley Taylor and Ray, whose words transport you to a world of enchanting storytelling.
Run Your Mouth – Birmingham’s Biggest Poetry Slam – The audience decides who claims the crown in this poetry slam. Headlining the whole event is London based poetry producer and performer, Tyrone Lewis!
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Hayley Frances Workshop – Find The Right Words
Fri 23 Feb, 1 – 3pm, Workshop Room 1
Led by therapeutic poet, Hayley Frances, this workshop presents prompts and exercises from The Right Words project, a heartfelt endeavor to guide mothers who have experienced baby loss through self-authorship and creative writing. Gently find the right words to accompany and process grief. Find routes to translate loss through poetry, develop emotional awareness, tend and honour grief. This workshop allows participants to explore their emotions in a supportive and empathetic community.
Funded by Arts Council England and the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust, “The Right Words” was part of the BEDLAM Arts & Mental Health Programme, offering a series of sessions that help you ease into therapeutic writing and creativity. The project has featured at MAC and The Poetry Pharmacy.
Tickets £16.50 (concessions £12.50)
Josie Alford Workshop – The Iconic Sonnet
Fri 23 Feb, 1.30 – 3.30pm, Workshop Room 2
Explore the sonnet form in this workshop with Josie Alford, a poet, youtuber and sonnet nerd (no, seriously, she wrote her dissertation on sonnets). We’ll examine the 14-line structure, delving into the realms of Shakespearean and Petrarchan styles. From iambic pentameter to volta, you’ll discover the poetic nuances that define sonnets and engage in discussions on themes ranging from love and mortality to societal reflections.
Participants will craft their own sonnets, honing their creativity and experience the art of expressing profound emotions within the confines of structured verse. This workshop promises a deep dive into the sonnet form’s rich history and empowers participants to add to that history
Tickets £16.50 (concessions £12.50)
Holly Pester Workshop – Dream Compositions
Fri 23 Feb, 3.30 – 5.30pm, Workshop Room 1
In this workshop, consider what strategies for composition and radical reflection come from our dream plots. We will consider the shared processes between dreaming and writing. We will find space to explore the peculiar imaginative shapes that occur to us during dreams, observing what languages of invention are being created there, and how to channel that language into new poetry. With this year’s Poetry School Performance Lecturer Holly Pester.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Nicole Sealey Workshop – Seeing is Believing: Drafting the Lasting Image
Fri 23 Feb, 4 – 6pm, Workshop Room 2
‘In The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux note that images should “produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is ‘like being alive twice.’”
As poets, after mining our respective memories, how do we deepen a reader’s experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft a lasting image? This workshop will explore the image and its implications. Participants in this all-level, generative workshop will review poems with images that reverberate and draft poems inspired by that work.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
FRIDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT: Sean Hewitt, Jason-Allen Paisant, Alycia Pirmohamed. Hosted by Helen Bowell
Fri 23 Feb, 7 – 8.30pm, Patrick Studio
Verve’s regular Friday evening poetry headline event features three incredible contempory poets. Sean Hewitt’s debut full collection Tongues of Fire (Cape, 2020) won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and the follow up, Rapture’s Road (Cape, 2024) is brand new for VERVE. Jason-Allen Paisant’s lauded debut, Thinking With Trees (Carcanet, 2021) was followed in 2023 by Forward Best Collection winning Self-Portait as Othello. Alycia Pirmohamed will be reading from her excellent debut Another Way to Split Water (Birlinn, 2022). Hosting these three wonderful poets for readings and discussion is Helen Bowell, whose debut pamphlet, The Barman (Bad Betty, 2022), was PBS Summer Pamphlet Choice.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Poetry Film Night
Fri 23 Feb, 9 – 10pm, Patrick Studio
At their last festival Verve hosted their first poetry film event and it was wonderful! They even had popcorn! From the 100+ films submitted they chose 14 to show at Birmingham Hippodrome. From poets reading poems but filmed interestingly, to artistic and chaotically abstract films, via animation and much more, come and see what visual and audio wonders they have selected this year! You won’t be disappointed.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Concession tickets are available to senior citizens, school pupils, students, people registered as disabled or unemployed.
Ella Duffy Eco Workshop – Underworld: From Myth-Making to Mycorrhiza (In collaboration with Magma)
Sat 24 Feb, 9.30 – 11.30am, Workshop Room 1
The underworld contains many mysteries, from known unknowns, to unknown unknowns – from hidden mycorrhizal networks to slow processes of decomposition. In this workshop, we invite participants into dark, damp, and heady landscapes. We consider how poetry might allow us to expand beyond our sensory perception, and create new encounters with the worlds under our feet. What kinds of conversations are we having on the page, and how might poems allow us to shift the ways we view the natural world, reframing subject and object? Above and below?
With a focus on ecologies, groundwork, concealed networks, and myth-making, Ella Duffy will explore both human and more-than-human archetypes – particularly those which might manifest beneath the surface. Magma 88: Underworld will be published in March 2024. Curated by Kate Simpson, Editor of Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Romalyn Ante Workshop – Poetics of Insects
Sat 24 Feb, 10am – 12 noon, Workshop Room 2
Join Verve in this generative poetry workshop about the poetics of insects. We will explore the intricate realm of insects as a lens through which we can examine both personal and climate crises. We will navigate the evolving landscapes of climate change through the lives of insects, from the tough ant to the fragile butterfly, and the mysterious firefly. We will draw inspiration from the works of acclaimed writers like Yvonne Reddick, Zaffar Kunial, Fiona Benson, and more. We will explore the challenges and adaptations these wonderful beings undergo in response to environmental shifts. In this workshop we will gain compelling metaphors and insights on the significant interplay between the personal and ecological, helping us craft our own resonating verses.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Poetry Society Young Poets Takeover: incl young person’s open mic!
Sat 24 Feb, 11am – 12pm, Patrick Studio
The Poetry Society’s Young Poets Takeovers are a space for up-and-coming young poets and performers to meet one another and share their work on stage.
This Takeover will feature headline sets from Roundhouse Poetry slam champion Maureen Onwunali, Foyle Young Poet Doroti Polgar and Birmingham’s very own Young Poet Laureate, Iona Mandal.
If you’re aged 25 or younger, we want to hear from you, too! Bring a poem and arrive early to sign up for our open mic. And join the community! We invite you to stay on afterwards for free refreshments and a chance to meet other young poetry lovers and find out more about Young Poets Network!
Tickets FREE
Deborah Alma Workshop for the Promotion of Writerly Reflection, Stimulation & Determination
Sat 24 Feb, 12 noon – 2pm, Workshop Room 1
“As a Poetry Pharmacist I have had many years of administering to the terrible afflictions that beset many writers, both at the start of their writing lives and that often return, like scabies, to irritate and bring dismay even in well-established writing careers. This session may ask you to step outside, both literally and figuratively, from what you’re already doing now. If taken as advised, it will assist with developing habits of noticing, of becoming habitually and intuitively creative, to come at your work slant and to practice self-care.” Deborah Alma
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Roy McFarlane Workshop: Poetry of the Clearing
Sat 24 Feb, 12.30 – 2.30pm, Workshop Room 2
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Babby Suggs invites souls to be free in ‘The Clearing’, we’ll be looking at those places in the past and present where you’ve found a place of safety, a safe haven in times of trouble, a place where you’ve found your true self and have sung, dance, cried and laughed aloud within those spaces. Whether that be carnivals, dancehalls, in music settings, food, home or in nature. At the end of it all we want to be able to affirm “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard…”
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Fifth Verve Poetry Performance Lecture – Holly Pester: A Mock-Epic of Cafés
Sat 24 Feb, 12.30 – 1.30pm, Patrick Studio
In this year’s Poetry Performance Lecture, join Holly Pester in an innovative exploration of cafés; their utopian promise and their clinking mundanity. This new performance piece will enact a mock-epic sequence of poems – mock in tone, with Holly cast as a parodic heroine, and mocking also in form, where any heroic narrative trajectory of the poems will repeatedly end in quotidian cafés – and work to situate the café as both a conceptual space and a motif to talk about hope, the future, and a life in art. We’ll touch on the work of some historical café authors, alongside seeing new poetic work from Holly herself.
The Verve Performance-Lecture (a stylised form of teaching-as-performance, originating from contemporary art practice), invites a poet to create a new piece of work fusing academic discourse with poetry and spoken word on a subject of their choosing. Brought to you in association with the Poetry School.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency | Panel Discussion with Seán Hewitt, Ella Duffy, Romalyn Ante, Rishi Dastidar, and Emma Must. Chaired by Kate Simpson
Sat 24 Feb, 2 – 3.30pm, Patrick Studio
Earth is rapidly becoming a biodiversity deficit. The illusions of civilisation, progress, and choice are crumbling around us, and we are out of time. But we are also existing outside of time, divided between two states – two modes – of panic and complacency, depending on our conceptual reckoning. This session brings together the editor and a selection of award-winning poets from the seminal anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (Valley Press, 2021), for a selection of readings and reflections on ecopoetics.
Audiences will be taken on a journey through various emotional states and poetic responses to them, from images of emergency and grief to forms of transformation and work, right through to the question of rewilding. As we attempt to address our own cognitive dissonance – as poets, as readers, as citizens – in what ways can the page be radically ecological? Be a form of linguistic and empathic activism? Be a way to relocate ourselves in time?
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Liz Berry Young Person’s Workshop – Poetry for Joy and Resistance! A FREE Young Poets Takeover workshop for 11-18 year olds
Sat 24 Feb, 2.30 – 4pm, Workshop Room 1
Join poet Liz Berry for a playful, practical session about writing joy and how our happiest poems can help us explore and express the things we really care about.
NB This workshop will contain material and exercises suitable for an 11-18 age group. If you’re younger than 11 and want to take part please contact cmangat@poetrysociety.org.uk to organise parental consent.
Tickets FREE but limited space so book early to secure your spot!
Zafar Kunial Eco Workshop – Naming Nature: The Ins and Outs of Words
Sat 24 Feb, 3.40pm – 5.20pm, Workshop Room 2
‘Sometimes I like to hide in the word foxgloves – in the middle of foxgloves. The xgl is hard to say, out of the England, out of its harbouring word.’ Zaffar Kunial has been widely revered for his deconstructions of words: deconstructions of sound and meaning. Where the words ‘climate’, and ‘crisis’ have become muddied, homogenised, over-used – and ultimately, ignored – how can finding precision in poetry, in the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of vocabularies, offer us a form of radical, ecological attention? In this inventive workshop, we will listen, intently, to syllables: to the building blocks of language. Kunial invites us to look again at the places we think we know – the words we think we know – and create new pathways for ourselves. England’s Green was published with Faber in 2022. Curated by Kate Simpson, Editor of Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Hannah Silva: My Child, The Algorithm
Sat 24 Feb, 4 – 5pm, Patrick Studio
Award-winning writer Hannah Silva performs material from her experimental memoir, My Child, the Algorithm, am exploration of queer single parenting and love, in conversation with an AI algorithm and a toddler. As Hannah navigates friendship, dating and life as a queer single parent in London, her toddler and the algorithm contribute humour, play and insight. With the help/disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs her story, and constructs a new one. She unravels everything she has been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving and parenting today. Queer, creative, sexy and compassionate, My Child, the Algorithm is non-fiction at its finest.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
SATURDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT: Nicole Sealey, Rebecca Goss, Alice Hiller. Hosted by Jo Bell
Sat 24 Feb, 5.30 – 7pm, Patrick Studio
This year’s Saturday evening headline features three incredible poets, all giants in their way on the contemporary UK and world poetry scene.
We’re thrilled to be hosting a rare UK appearance from Nicole Sealey whose most recent two collections have been recently published by Bloodaxe. An extract from Nicole’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure won The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2021. Joining Denise are Rebecca Goss and Alice Hiller. Rebecca’s newest collection Latch (Carcanet, 2023) follows 2019’s Girl and the Forwards shortlisted Her Birth (Carcanet, 2023). Alice’s debut full collection, Bird of Winter (Pavilion, 2021) was shortlisted for Best First Collection at the Forwards in the same year. Hosting these three amazing poets for readings and discussion is Jo Bell, renowned poet and co-author of How to be a Poet (Nine Arches Press, 2017).
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Luke Wright’s Silver Jubilee, with special guest, Bohdan Piasecki
Sat 24 Feb, 7.30 – 9pm, Patrick Studio
Over twenty-five years, Luke Wright has built up a reputation for being one of Britain’s most popular live poets. This year he tries to celebrate his jubilee but ends up taking a deep dive into himself, throwing up questions about class, privilege and his adoption. Edinburgh Fringe smash hit.
“This is the best thing that poet Luke Wright has done, which is saying something.” ★★★★★ The Telegraph
“A winning combination of honesty, humour, ire and wonder. He is at the peak of his powers.” ★★★★★ The Stage
“Breathtaking … with a sharpness and wisdom that lifts the soul, and soothes the battered heart.” ★★★★ The Scotsman.
Supporting and introducing Luke will be local poetry powerhouse and winner of this year’s inaugural Forward Prize for Best Performed Poem, Bohdan Piasecki.
Tickets £10 (concessions £8)
Kit Fan Workshop – The Art of the Seen and the Unseen
Sun 25 Feb, 10am – 12 noon, Workshop Room 1
Sight plays an uncanny role in art. Whether it’s in painting, sculpture, architecture or music, we experience art through our eyes and imagination in a way that’s public and personal. While capturing the seen, poetry can also reach out to the unseen, the hidden worlds and forces that shape the way we write, read, and connect with feelings and emotions that are outside of our own self.
Through close reading, this workshop will focus on how each word and line collaborate with each other to give rise to meaning and the illusion of meaning. Participants will bring poems or work-in-progress to the workshop which will concentrate on the craft of poetry and explore how the art of the seen and unseen helps shape a poem and a book.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Judy Brown Workshop – The Mouth In the Poem: Source/ Hiding Place/ Factory/ Prison
Sun 25 Feb, 10.30am – 12.30pm, Workshop Room 2
As well as being part of the instrument for speaking poetry, mouths and their actions appear in many guises in poems. They can be sites of oracle and expressiveness – at the other extreme Elias Canetti called the mouth ‘the prototype of all prisons’. Explore and create work involving biting into (or back), swallowing up, blurting and spitting out, and clamming up.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
The Verve Poetry Festival Competition Event: Eco Poetry, hosted by Helen Mort
Sun 25 Feb, 11am – 12.30pm, Patrick Studio
The Verve Competition on the Theme of Eco-Poetry opened for entries late in 2023, judged by the wonderful Helen Mort. Also, for the first time, we opened to competition up to entries from 11-17 year olds. This FREE to attend event will feature all the winners and commended poets plus ten selected from our 11-17 entries. The poets will read their poems on our subject and help launch our annual festival anthology. The event will be hosted by Helen herself and will be a fun and lively affair, featuring poets of all kinds and levels of experience. Always a festival highlight!
Tickets FREE
Rebecca Goss Workshop – Vessels: Life, death, and refuge
Sun 25 Feb, 12.30 – 2.30pm, Workshop Room 1
The vessel takes multiple forms: a boat, an urn, a body. In this workshop you will consider the object as container and look closely at what it holds. Jacob Polley’s jar of honey stores more than sticky sweetness, it holds the sun, ‘all flesh and no bones’, whilst Elizabeth Burns writes ‘the earth itself might almost be a vast potter’s wheel, each of us, held by invisible hands/a vessel turned upon it.’ Vessels can be keepers of the human spirit; they can be carriers of human life. Reflecting how and why vessels are made, this workshop will be an opportunity to uncover the emotional and physical refuge vessels can offer. Using a variety of stimulating texts, join Rebecca to write poems that will explore the vessel’s significance to you.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Alice Hiller Workshop – Working the rainbow: using colour to amplify your poem’s impact and reach
Sun 25 Feb, 1 – 3pm, Workshop Room 2
Led by Alice Hiller, this hands-on workshop will explore how colour can be channelled to intensify the emotional, political and philosophical resonances of a poem. Generative practical exercises will offer new ways into creating – including a colour-themed guided freewrite, and step by step processes drawing together memory and association with found materials. Supporting this, we will also look at colour theory and consider how colour is used by poets including Elisabeth Bishop, Gail McConnell, Airea D. Matthews, Anthony Joseph, Paul Tran, Padraig Regan and Ella Frears.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Nicole Sealey reading and in conversation with Roy McFarlane
Sun 25 Feb, 1 – 2pm, Patrick Studio
We couldn’t let Nicole Sealsey come all the way from the states for a rare UK appearance without hearing from her a second time! This event will see her in conversation with VERVE regular Roy McFarlane and hear a further reading from her wonderful and vital new collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Bloodaxe, 2023)
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology hosted by Jennifer Wong and Tim Tim Cheng
Sun 25 Feb, 2.30 – 4pm, Patrick Studio
Featuring both established and emerging Hong Kong poets across generations and continents, Where Else offers a glimpse into an exciting, diverse range of voices that make up the diasporic imagination of the contemporary Hong Kong poetry community. Adopting a diasporic approach, the anthology encompasses both native Hong Kong writers as well as expatriate and mixed-race voices who were born or have lived in the city. Featuring Kit Fan, Judy Brown, Ian Humphreys, Jennifer Lee Tsai & Claire Cox reading their anthology poems as well as work from their recent publications.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
Helen Mort Workshop – Making something happen: poetry and power
Sun 25 Feb, 3 – 5pm, Workshop Room 1
In The Defence of Poetry, 1821, Shelley claimed that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. This implies a huge amount of power. In this workshop, we’ll consider how much poetry can be an agent of change and discuss the poems that have changed us. There will be reading and creative writing prompts, but all levels of experience are welcome. Please come to the workshop prepared to talk about a poem that has changed or influenced you, if you can.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £17.50)
Linda France Eco Workshop – Upcycling, Unlearning, Undoing: Language of Transition
Sun 25 Feb, 3.30 – 5.30pm, Workshop Room 2
Linda France is a pioneer of environmental writing – an advocate for language and its ability to shift cultural consciousness. In this workshop, we hover around definitions of ‘the wild’: from inside to outside, from doing to undoing, and from learning to unlearning. We will consider what the page and an ecosystem have in common: how words carry as much weight as actions, and how we can upcycle language to reflect upon, and expand our understanding of a rapidly changing world. Curated by Kate Simpson, Editor of Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency.
Tickets £22.50 (concessions £16.50)
Roy McFarlane’s Take Flight with Randolph Matthews and support from AFLO the poet
Sun 25 Feb, 4.30 – 6pm, Patrick Studio
Take Flight is a captivating blend of spoken word poetry, soulful music, and compelling storytelling. Adapting poems from Living by Troubled Waters (Nine Arches Press, 2023) Randolph and Roy, two passionate creatives, will take the audience on an evocative journey through the tapestry of human experiences, touching on themes of migration, social injustice, family, love and the human spirit. The collaboration brings voice to the voiceless, praise to our ancestors and a celebration of hope. A performance which is a dynamic fusion of theatrical artistry with an eclectic mix of jazz, soul and gospel, leaving audiences moved and inspired.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)
SUNDAY NIGHT HEADLINE EVENT: Daljit Nagra, Isabelle Galleymore, Marjorie Lotfi
Sun 25 Feb, 6.30 – 8pm, Patrick Studio
Our final headline event of the weekend brings three wonderful poets together to read and talk about their work. Poetry royalty, Daljit Nagra will be reading from his latest book, Indiom (Faber, 2023) – an astonishing new work from this much admired poet. Birmingham-based Isabel Galleymore’s last book, Significant Other (Carcanet, 2019), was shortlisted for the Forward’s First Book Award and a Telegraph book of the year. The follow-up, Baby Schema, due out from Carcanet in March 2024, will be available early and exclusively at VERVE. Marjorie Lotfi’s debut collection, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe, 2023) won the James Berry Poetry Prize and was a PBS Special Commendation. This amazing line-up, a real treat, will be hosted for us by Jonathan Davidson from Writing West Midlands and founder of Birmingham Literature Festival.
With support of University of Birmingham.
Tickets £8 (concessions £6)