2026 Festival Artists
Agata Maslowska was born in Poland and lives in Scotland. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various magazines and journals. She is the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Hawthornden Writing Fellowship. Her debut poetry collection Woman : Plant : Language was published by Bad Betty Press in September 2025.
Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh. His writing seeks to illuminate love and loss while unpacking what it means to be from ni de aquí, ni de allá. He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know and Holy Boys and the novel How We Named the Stars. He has been shortlisted for the Kavya Prize, Morley Lit Prize, Mo Siewcharran Prize and Saltire Society’s Poetry Book of The Year. In 2024, he was selected as one of The Observer’s 10 Best Debut Novelists. The following year he was named by The Skinny as one of 12 of Scotland’s Next Generation of Writers.
Ashley Hickson-Lovence is an acclaimed Carnegie-nominated author and poet with a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. His debut novel The 392 was released with OWN IT! in 2019. His second novel Your Show, based on the life and career of former Black football referee Uriah Rennie, was released with Faber in 2022. His third book Wild East was released with Penguin in 2024 and his debut poetry collection Why I Am Not a Bus Driver was released last April.
Carl Phillips’s latest book of poems is Scattered Snows, to the North (Carcanet/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022) won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.
Clive Birnie is a poet-artist-printmaker who works in both text and visual media. He finds inspiration at a place where poetry and art collide into something which gets called text-based-art but sometimes he types up the results as text only poems such as those included in Palimpsest. He was the Hashtag# poet in residence at the StAnza International Poetry Festival in 2016. He has exhibited work at the Saatchi backed The Other Art Fair, the Evolver Prize Exhibition, the Royal West of England Academy Open, Spike Island (during Paul Hawkins’s Poem Brut event), the Clifton branch of cafe chain Boston Tea Party and in the public space of Millennium Square, Bristol. Palimpsest is the eighth in a sequence of experimental collage and/or visual poetry sequences following Terminal Insemination Art (Silkworms Ink 2011), Cutting Up the Economist (Burning Eye 2014), Hashtag# Poetry (Burning Eye 2016), O-Neg Alphabet – a visual response to Ursprungsalphabet by Nora Gomringer (Instagram & YouTube 2016), Impossible Poems (a self-published limited edition box-set of Polaroid-poems 2017), the Skye Numbers series (exhibited at the Other Art Fair Bristol 2017) and the Lemon Squeezer (in Bristol, edited by Paul Hawkins, Dostoyevsky Wannabe 2018).
Dean Tsang is a poet and spoken word performer based in Edinburgh. A multi-slam champion and runner-up at this year’s Scotland National Slam, his work has been featured in ITV News, Loud Poets and Lighthouse Books. His work explores the transformative nature of anxiety, with his Anxious Measurements trilogy winning a Critics Choice Award at the Bay Fringe and a nomination for best spoken word show at Buxton Fringe.
Durs Grünbein, 1962 born in Dresden, lives in Berlin and Rome. After the decline of the Soviet Empire he started travelling throughout Europe, South Asia and the United States. Since 2005 Professor for Poetics and Aesthetics at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Member of several German Academies and since 2009 member of the Order Pour le mérite for Science and Arts in Germany. He published sixteen collections of poetry, one diary, a book of prose memories and five books of essays. Translations of Aischylos, Seneca, Juvenal, Ausonius, Dante, poetry by Wallace Stevens, Elisabeth Bishop, Samuel Beckett. His work has been awarded major German and International literary prizesincluding Büchner-Price 1995, Nietzsche-Price 2004, Hölderlin-Price 2005, Pasolini-Price in Italy 2006, Tomas-Transtömer-Price in Sweden 2012 and Zbigniew-Herbert-Price for International Poetry in Poland 2020.
Recently published: Die Jahre im Zoo. Prose. Suhrkamp Berlin 2015. Zündkerzen. Poems. Suhrkamp Berlin 2017. Aus der Traum (Kartei). Essays and Notes. Suhrkamp Berlin 2019. Jenseits der Literatur (Oxford Lectures). Suhrkamp Berlin 2020. Äquidistanz. Poems. Suhrkamp Berlin 2022. Der Komet. Die Geschichte der Dora W. A report. Suhrkamp Berlin 2023.
Fife Writes has been around for many years, though has existed as a charity only since January 2020. On 1st July 2022, The Byre Writers officially joined with Fife Writes creating a much larger group. It is guided by a very small organising team but is always on the lookout for additional people to join and help out with the many tasks that need to be carried out to keep a small charity working.
Its main purpose is to encourage involvement and provide the opportunity to write and perform. It aims to be a peer support group for writers of all genres and to encourage each other to write and share their work. It holds events such as storytelling, short stories, novels, poetry, performance and music across Fife where readers and performers are invited from the very inexperienced to full professionals.
It also holds creative writing workshops, runs a programme of writing support groups and hosts other events to support writers across Fife.
Greg Thomas is a poet, artist, and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the author of Border Blurs: Concrete Poetry in England and Scotland (Liverpool UP, 2019) and has written extensively on visual and concrete poetries, text art, and multimedia art for a wide range of publications and websites. His new edition of Edwin Morgan’s work A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry, co-edited with Julie Johnstone, is forthcoming from Reaktion in June 2026.
Harry Man’s first pamphlet, Lift won the UNESCO Bridges of Struga Award. His co-collection authored with Endre Ruset, Deretter (‘Thereafter’, Flamme Forlag,2021) won the Stephen Spender Prize and was a Dagblaget and Broken Sleep Books Book of the Year. He has also translated Endre Ruset’s Noriaki (Broken Sleep Books) into English which contains a foreword by bestselling crime novelist Jo Nesbø. His latest book, Popular Song was published by Nine Arches Press (2024) and was shortlisted for a Gladstone’s Library Writer in Residence Award 2026. He teaches at the University of Oxford and lives in the Tees Valley. www.manmadebooks.co.uk
Iyad Hayatleh is a Palestinian poet and translator. He was born and grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, and has lived in Glasgow since 2000. Hayatleh has published work in Arabic and given readings in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. In Scotland, his work has appeared in magazines as well as pamphlets. His first collection, Beyond all Measure, was published by Survivor’s Press in 2007. Hayatleh collaborated with the poet Tessa Ransford on a two-way translation project, resulting in the book A Rug of a Thousand Colours (Luath Press, 2012), inspired by the Five Pillars of Islam. He is an active member of Scottish PEN as well as Artists in Exile Glasgow, and has led workshops in Glasgow and Inverness schools, sponsored by the Scottish Poetry Library and Oxfam. He has taken part in readings across Scotland, including events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He has featured on BBC radio programmes, and gained further media exposure in the Scottish press.
Joan Sullivan is a lens-based artist, writer and farmer from Quebec, Canada, whose work has focused exclusively on climate change for two decades. Oscillating between representation and abstraction, her recent images underscore our collective ambivalence to a rapidly changing world. She collaborates frequently with musicians, poets and scientists to create immersive installations that give voice to the nonhuman. For StAnza, Joan created her first architectural projection during an art-science residency at the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of Saint Andrews.
Julie Laing is a writer and artist from Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet, the edge of rhizome, was published by Red Squirrel Press in 2025 and her first collection is forthcoming in 2026 with Art Riot Press. Julie won the 2023 William Bonar Poetry Prize, the Wigtown Poetry Prize 2022 and her poem, livestream, hope street, was selected as one of Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems 2022. Other work has been published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter magazine and elsewhere. She was mentored through the St Mungo Mirrorball’s Clydebuilt 13 verse apprenticeship scheme and co-hosts off-page visual poetry programme with CD Boyland and Leo Plumb.
Kate Hendry’s poetry has been widely published in magazines, including PN Review, Mslexia, The Rialto and Poetry Wales. Her first pamphlet, The Lost Original, was published by HappenStance Press. Her second, MX SIMP, was published by Mariscat Press and was shortlisted for the 2023 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.
Kim Addonizio is the author of nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. Her latest poetry collection is Exit Opera, from W.W. Norton. She teaches poetry workshops on Zoom from Oakland, CA and is online at www.kimaddonizio.com.
Founded in 2014 as a monthly event series, for over ten years Loud Poets have pushed the envelope of spoken word poetry through innovative show formats, high-quality production, and digital integration. Now a community-interest company, they continue to tour their award-winning style across the UK and Europe while remaining firmly committed to building the Scottish spoken word scene and providing exciting, high-calibre performance and development opportunities.
Martin Malone now divides his time between Donegal, Aberdeenshire and France. He has published four poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011), Cur (Shoestring, 2015), The Unreturning (Shoestring 2019), Gardenstown (Broken Sleep Books 2024) and a Selected Poems 2005 – 2020: Larksong Static (Hedgehog 2020). He’s also published 4 pamphlets: 17 Landscapes (Bluegate Books), Prodigals (The Black Light Engine Room), Mr. Willett’s Summertime (Poetry Salzburg), Sonnets for My Mother as Lear (Mariscat, 2025). He is an editor at Poetry Salzburg Review and was a Poetry Ambassador for the Scottish Poetry Library.His rock band, Innocents Abroad, have just released their third album, Late Spring.
Michael Mullen is a queer poet, writer and spoken-word artists from Glasgow. Comfortable on the stage and the page, their work has appeared in Gutter, Neu Reekie: Neu Voices, Bella Caledonia and The Scotsman and he has appeared on Life and Rhymes with Benjamin Zephaniah on Sky Arts and was the Scottish National Slam Championship runner-up. The recipient of the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2023-24, their first collection Goonie was published in 2025 with Little, Brown and was shortlisted for the Forward Jerwood Prize for best first collection. They were The List magazine’s best rising Scottish author of 2025.
Niall Campbell is a poet, librettist, and editor.
Originally from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, his first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. A selection from these two collections was published as part of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in the U.S. in 2016.
His newest collection, The Island in the Sound, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2025.
As a librettist, his work has been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Niall has also written for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4.
He is Poetry Editor of the UK journal Poetry London, and lives in Fife.
Pàdraig is a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis. He is an academic, writer and broadcaster whose work is influenced by the diverse linguistic heritage of his birthplace. With an MA from Glasgow University and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, Mackay has worked at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University Belfast, and at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, where he was writer in residence. He has also worked as a journalist and television news producer for the BBC. He lectures on literature at the University of St Andrews. Pàdraig is Scotland’s Makar 2024-2027.
Rachel McCrum is originally from Northern Ireland and has lived in Montréal since 2017. From 2010 to 2016, she was based in Edinburgh where she was the first BBC Scotland Poet-in-Residence and recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. Her collection The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate (Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2018) was published in a bilingual edition with Mémoire d’encrier in 2020, as Le premier coup de clairon pour réveiller les femmes immorales (Finalist for 2022 Cole Foundation Translation Prize). With spoken word artist Amélie Prévost, she co-wrote and co-performs in La belle-mère/The Stepmother. She is the vocalist for poetry-noise group Pigs&Wolves.
Robyn Lawrence plays piano as part of SpeakEasy. She is experienced in providing high-quality musical accompaniment to spoken word and theatrical works, having composed for Drew Gill’s Hole at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and RJ Hunter’s Words on World’s Ending for the CCA’s Telephone to the World Programme.
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and the author of seven poetry collections. His 2010 book, Lighthead, won the National Book Award and in 2016 American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship.
Alan Grieve and Eddie Summerton exhibit individually, nationally and internationally and operate together as the art group A+E. Their collaborative work presents a humorous and irreverent exploration of memories and mythologies of landscape and objects across multiple platforms and events, ranging from galleries and museums to publications and public art.
Anthony Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction, and Professor at the University of York. Anthony’s most recent book, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet, 2024), interweaves Scotland, Cornwall, and the Caribbean. They have published nine books and eight pamphlets, and enjoy collaboration, including theatre-making, traditional masquerade, and sonic and visual explorations. Anthony’s work has been recognized with awards including the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors). Anthony believes that a fossil-free, genocide-free books industry is possible. Their selected essays will be published by Carcanet in 2026.
Barbara Usher’s poetry has been published in Borderlands: an Anthology, Amethyst Review, the Catholic Poetry Room, Dreich, Green Ink Poetry, Last Leaves, Last Stanza, Liennekjournal, and in the anthology Thin Places, Sacred Spaces (ed. Sarah Law). Her work appeared on the Resilience soundscape 2022 for Live Borders, with background accompaniment of her (late) pigs. She has contributed to the Sonic Museum, a project of Heids and Herts, Scotland, and is the rep for the Fife Stanza group. https://barbaraushernoahsarcs.com/
CD Boyland is a poet, visual poet, and editor who lives in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow. His debut, full-length collection, Mephistopheles was published by Blue Diode Press in 2023. His pamphlets are Ptchdk (2023); Vessel (2022); SMC (also 2022) and User Stories (2020). Other work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as: 3AM Magazine, Beir Bua, Gutter, The Interpreter’s House, The North and New Writing Scotland. He is a Trustee of the Edwin Morgan Trust and also co-edits The Glasgow Review of Books.
Chisom Okafor is a Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, presently living in Alabama where he is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate and Graduate Council Fellow. His poems, which mostly explore his chronic illness, appear in The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, an anthology of disabled and neuro-divergent poets(ed. Hannah Soyer) and In-Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (ed. Rebecca Burke). He has received support from the Sundress Academy for the Arts and Commonwealth Foundation.
Connor Bristow is a community musician and composer who values collaboration and enjoys the process of developing something new and getting to know other creative people through that process. Their practice encompasses sound, music and technology and they like to explore the boundaries between the three and how they can utilise technology to widen creativity and access. The biggest and most rewarding part of their practice is working with a wide range of community groups to engage non-music makers in the joy of making sound. Through technology, they are continually exploring different forms of interactivity and how this can be used to shape how we access sound.
[BIO COMING SOON]
Elena is Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the Refuge in a Moving World network. Her recent research projects include ‘Local Community Experiences of and Responses to Displacement from Syria’ (see www.refugeehosts.org) and ‘Southern-led Responses to Displacement: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Türkiye’ (www.southernresponses.org). She is Editor-in-Chief of the Migration and Society journal, and her publications include The Ideal Refugees (Syracuse University Press, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Handbook of South-South Relations (Routledge, 2018); Refuge in a Moving World: Refugee and migrant journeys across disciplines (UCL Press, 2020); and, with Yousif M. Qasmiyeh and Saiful Hum Omi, The Southern Eye: Co-Seeing Displacements (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).
A performer by nature and a poet by trade, Georgie Jones has been praised for her ‘formidable stage presence and compelling way with words’ (Reviews Hub). Roundhouse Poetry Slam finalist turned Resident Artist and BBC Words First alum, Georgie has toured her work across the UK, gathered millions of views online and (almost) performed with Pitbull at the O2. Technically just outside it, but she’s counting it nonetheless. Her debut collection And The World Spins Anyway was published in September ‘25 with Burning Eye.
Hamish Whyte was born in 1947 near Glasgow where he lived before moving to Edinburgh in 2004. He is a former librarian and Honorary Research Fellow in Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow. Shoestring Press has published five collections of his poems. He’s edited many anthologies, runs the award-winning Mariscat Press (founded 1982) publishing poetry, is a member of Edinburgh’s Shore Poets and plays drums in local bands Dekoy and The Self-Righteous Brothers.
Helen Ross is a writer from Glasgow, where she is a teacher of History and Modern Studies. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies and online, including, The Amethyst Review, Black Bough, Dreich (forthcoming), The Darg, Glasgow: Historical City and Paisley Poems.
Jeda Pearl is a Scottish Jamaican writer and arts programmer based in Leith, Edinburgh. Her work often traverses/reflects the ‘in between’, exploring intersections of be/longing, (intergenerational) memory, disability, and speculative worlds. She was shortlisted for the RSL Jerwood Poetry Award 2024 and Sky Arts RSL Poetry Award 2022, and longlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize 2022. Group commissions include Disrupting the Narrative, North Bridge: Where We Travelled, and Windrush Legacy: Creative Reflections. Find her poetry in Hunter’s Voices (Stewed Rhubarb), PASSIONS (Rhubaba), Shoreline of Infinity, Sleekit (Tapsalteerie). Jeda’s debut collection is Time Cleaves Itself (Peepal Tree Press).
Juana Adcock is a poet, translator and editor. She was born and raised in Mexico, and writes in both English and Spanish. Her book I Sugar the Bones (Out-Spoken Press) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and for the Saltire Award for best poetry collection. She is co-editor of the anthology Temporary Archives: Poetry by women of Latin America (Arc, 2022) and has translated Laura Wittner’s Translation of the Route (Bloodaxe/PTC, 2024) and Hubert Matiuwaa’s The Dogs Dreamt, both of which received PEN Translates awards.She regularly performs at literary festivals across Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Karen Leeder is a writer and translator and Schwarz-Taylor Chair of German Language Literature at the University of Oxford. She translates from the German including work by Volker Braun, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Michael Krüger, Durs Grünbein, Evelyn Schlag, Ulrike Almut Sandig, and Raoul Schrott among others. She has won many awards, including the Schlegel-Tieck prize (2004 and 2021); the Stephen Spender Open Prize (2011), the EUNIC European new voices award and a Pen Heim Award (2018); the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize (2018) and, most recently, the Griffin Prize 2025 for her translation of Durs Grünbein, Psyche Running: Selected Poems 2005-2022 (Seagull, 2024).
Keith Jarrett’s work traces Caribbean history, religion and sexuality. A multiple poetry slam champion, he was selected for the International Literary Showcase as an outstanding LGBT writer. His poem, ‘From the Logbook’, was projected onto St. Paul’s Cathedral.His play, Safest Spot in Town, was performed at the Old Vic and aired on BBC Four. Keith’s screen appearances include Benjamin Zephaniah’s BAFTA-winning show Life & Rhymes. He holds a PhD from Birkbeck and teaches at New York University London. Hide Me Under the Blood and I Shall Be Satisfied is his long-awaited second poetry collection; his novel is forthcoming in 2027.
Leo Plumb is an artist based at the Briggait in Glasgow, his practice encompasses moving image, drawing and photography. In February 2025, his solo exhibition at Creative Exchange Perth considered an urban responses to storms and floods. He studied at Glasgow School of Art, Leeds Metropolitan University and Estonian Academy of Arts and helped found Mexico Project Space, a curatorial group in Leeds from 2011-2014. Since 2022, he has contributed to Off Page a visual poetry project both as an artist and a curator.
Malaika Kegode is an award-winning writer, performer, and creative producer based in Bristol, focused on celebrating overlooked communities through mixed-discipline storytelling. Beginning as a performance poet in 2014, she has expanded into theatre, radio, film curation, and teaching. Her BBC Radio 4 drama Tribe of Two was shortlisted for the prestigious Imison Award, and she was mentored through Channel 4’s 4Screenwriting course in 2025. Malaika works as a mentor, dramaturg, and editor, advocating for creativity as a tool for healing and connection. She is a Trustee for mental health and arts charity Many Minds.
Though poet and essayist Mary Ruefle was born outside Pittsburgh, she spent her youth moving around the United States and Europe with her military family. She has published over a dozen books of poetry, including Dunce (2019), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, My Private Property (2016), Indeed I Was Pleased with the World (2007), and The Adamant (1989), which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) and the work of fiction The Most of It (2008). A Little White Shadow (2006), her book of erasures—found texts in which all but a few words have been erased from the page—reveals what Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “haiku-like minifables, sideways aphorisms, and hauntingly perplexing koans.” Ruefle’s erasures are available to view on her website; a full-color facsimile of her erasure Incarnation of Now was published in a limited edition by See Double Press.
Ruefle’s free-verse poetry is at once funny and dark, domestic and wild. Reviewing Post Meridian (2000), critic Lisa Beskin of the Boston Review observed, “Like John Ashbery and James Tate, Mary Ruefle investigates the multiplicities and frailties of being with an associative inventiveness and a lightness of touch; the purposefulness of her enquiry never eclipses the remarkable beauty of her work.”
Ruefle earned a BA from Bennington College. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers’ Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems (2003), American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), and The Next American Essay (2002).
Ruefle has taught at Vermont College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Vermont.
Natalia Bocian (born 2000) is a Polish painter, based in Glasgow in Scotland.
She graduated from architecture in 2022 with a BArch before moving on to study painting at Glasgow School of Art. In her work she focuses on depicting the world on the brink of climate collapse, where, after years of careless extraction, the earth is futile and catastrophic events, such as floods, droughts, plagues, and epidemics, have become an ordinary occurrence.
Dr Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London and founder of Obsidian Foundation. Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick’s debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian’s best books of the year. His poems have appeared in Poetry, the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo, Birmingham Lit Journal and Wasafiri. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL)
Polly Atkin lives in Grasmere, in the English Lake District. She grew up in Nottingham, then lived in East London for seven years before moving North West.
She writes poetry and nonfiction.
Her debut poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture was published in February 2017 by Seren, followed in October 2021 by her second collection Much With Body, a PBS Winter 2021 recommendation and Laurel Prize longlistee, supported by a 2020 Northern Writers Award and a residency at Cove Park.
Her biography, Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021) is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness, and place her into Disability History.
Her memoir exploring place, belonging and chronic illness, Some Of Us Just Fall, was published by Sceptre in summer 2023.
She has taught English and Creative Writing at QMUL, Lancaster University, and the Universities of Strathclyde and Cumbria. She holds a doctorate on Romantic legacies and the Lake District, conducted under the AHRC Landscape and Environment project, in collaboration with The Wordsworth Trust and Lancaster University.
RJ Hunter (they/she) is an award-winning writer, theatre-maker and performance poet based in Scotland. Writing from a trans-feminine perspective, RJ Hunter writes with urgency yet empathy, and is known for blistering performances that exhilarate any audience, having performed in venues around the UK with organisations including Loud Poets, Push the Boat Out Festival and Glastonbury Festival. Hunter’s debut poetry pamphlet, Flustercuck, was released in June 2023 with a sold-out launch event. Stupid Sexy Poem Show, Hunter’s first full-length solo show, has been performed to sold-out crowds across the country, met with critical acclaim, including being deemed ‘the future voice of the medium of spoken-word’ (Corr Blimey). RJ Hunter is the 2023 Loud Poets Grand Slam Champion and the Runner-Up at the Scottish Slam Championship 2024.
Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet, poet and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (2015) won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second, Foretokens (2025) is a PBS Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Previous honours include fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool and the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus.
Born and educated in Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a poet and translator who completed his doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Time, the body and ruination inform his poetry and prose, which have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, Critical Quarterly, Cambridge Literary Review, PN Review, Stand, New England Review, Poetry London and Wasafiri. Yousif is the Creative Encounters Editor of the Migration and Society journal, Writer-in-Residence for the Refugee Hosts project, and a Poetry Book Society Selector. His debut collection, Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), was a 2021 PBS Recommendation; was selected as one of the Best Poetry Books of 2021 by the Telegraph and the Irish Times; was highly commended by the 2021 Forward Prizes for Poetry; and was shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. Yousif’s latest book is Eating the Archive (Broken Sleep Books, 2023).
Amélie Prévost is an actress, poet and spoken word artist from Montreal, Canada. She has created many shows such as the solo performance Kamikaze du vendredi, and Fol ouvrage (Torcher des paillettes) with Elkahna Talbi (Queen Ka). These two shows toured in Canada and France for several years. She was World Cup poetry slam champion in 2016 in Paris. She has published three books of poetry. Osti d’pain blanc, published by éditions de l’Hexagone, was a finalist for the CoPo des lycéens award in 2024. She is also a member of the group Primaires, les couleurs secondaires. The manuscript of their show Bleu noyade was published with Planète rebelle in 2025.
Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is an award–winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. As a musician, he has released nine critically acclaimed albums. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.
Caitlin O’Ryan is an actor and poet who has headlined several leading spoken word nights. She has been commissioned by the likes of Refuge and Amnesty International – performing on the latter’s behalf at Glastonbury Festival 2025. Best known for her role in Outlander, her poem ‘At What Point’ amassed over 18 million views online, and led to an appearance on BBC Woman’s Hour. In August, Caitlin released her debut poetry collection At What Point with Burning Eye Books and was invited to launch the book at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Caitlin’s poetry is vulnerable, confronting and extremely relatable.
Charles Lang is from Glasgow. His poems have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review and The Stinging Fly. He was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in 2022. In 2024, he was Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. His collection The Oasis was published by Skein Press in 2025 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Ciara Maguire is a writer and poet living in Glasgow. Her work has been published in Extra Teeth, bath magg, SPAM Zine, Gutter, Propel Magazine and more. Her debut pamphlet, Impossible Heat, was published in 2024 with Little Betty Press and was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.
David Wheatley is a poet, translator, editor and critic. His most recent poetry collection is Child Ballad (Carcanet, 2023). He is the translator of Aifric Mac Aodha’s Irish-language collections Foreign News and Old Friends from Gallery Press and, with Aibhle Darcy, he coedited The Cambridge History of Irish Women’s Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2021). He lives in rural Aberdeenshire.
Doroti Polgar is a poet and performer who studies English at the University of St Andrews. Her work has been commended in the Foyle Young Poets Prize, and featured by organisations including the Poetry Society, Verve Poetry Festival, BBC Sounds, Channel 5, and NHS Blood & Transplant. Last year, she entered the Loud Poets Slam for the first time and is hugely grateful for all the support and opportunities she has received since.
Endre Ruset is a poet, literary critic and translator from Molde, Norway. He has written seven collections of poetry including most recently Stjålet venn ‘Stolen Friend’ (Flamme Forlag, 2024). His previous collections include Kims lek, (‘Kim’s Game’ Gyldendal, 2005) and Elsket og savnet, (‘Loved and missed’ Kolon, 2014). He has been awarded a Bjørnson Scholarship and the prestigious Bookkeeper Scholarship (2015). He has also been nominated for a Bastian Award for Translation and his latest book, Deretter (Flamme Forlag, 2021) co-authored with Harry Man, was a Dagbladet Book of the Year.
Glasgow Zine Library believes in the radical power of DIY culture. Established first as a small festival run by two pals in 2013, GZL is now a charity, a self-publishing library and community arts space in Govanhill, Glasgow. GZL is the largest independent zine library in the UK with an international collection of over 4,000 zines. We welcome around 9,000 people each year, across over 150 events, delivered in partnership with hundreds of artists. We are run by a small dedicated local team with the support of over 60 volunteers. Zines (self-published magazines) are part of the rich history of radical self-publishing. They are small-scale publications that can be made by anyone. Often they are the only records of subcultures, countercultures, and alternative movements. Zines are used for creative expression and to share information, distribute resources and build community – on topics from fan culture to social justice. GZL was founded to preserve these stories, create opportunities to tell new ones, and celebrate DIY arts culture and zine heritage.
World Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker is a poet, a maths graduate, and a new father. His work has connected with millions online, from being shared on TED.com to making people cry through their TikTok and Instagram feeds, but he thinks it is even better in person. His new collection Tender is published with Canongate in March 2026 alongside another national tour, and he can’t flipping wait. He lives and writes and swims and runs and takes his baby to nice coffee shops in Margate.
Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber / Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.
Jim Carruth was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up on his parents’ dairy farm. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2009 and has been the winner of the James McCash poetry competition, the McLellan Poetry Prize and the Callum Macdonald prize.
His first pamphlet, Bovine Pastoral, came out in 2004 and was followed by four further chapbooks as part of the Haltered Chronicles sequence. Killochries, a verse novella, tracking the relationship of two very different men working a remote sheep farm, was published in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year, the Seamus Heaney Centre For Poetry Prize and the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize for first collection. Far Field, published in 2023 was the final part of the Auchensale Trilogy following on from Black Cart and Bale Fire – which explores the changing rural landscape.
Julie Johnstone is an artist, curator, editor, and publisher based in Edinburgh. She was previously the Head Librarian of the Scottish Poetry Library, and established the Edwin Morgan Archive there. She has curated numerous exhibitions of concrete poetry and artists’ books. Her own artists’ books are held in national and international collections including Tate Library. Through her Essence Press she has published a wide range of poets and artists. Her new edition of Edwin Morgan’s work A Home in Space: Selected Concrete, Visual and Sound Poetry, co-edited with Greg Thomas, is forthcoming from Reaktion Books in June 2026.
Poet, fabulist, playwright and librettist, Karthika Naïr was born with RDEB inversa, a rare disorder of the skin and mucous membranes. Even minor friction – sneezes, handshakes – can result in erosions or blisters resembling 3rd degree burns. When not combating triffids in hospital, she can usually be found around dance studios; Sometimes, this results in books (A Different Distance with Marilyn Hacker, The Honey Hunter…), sometimes in dance, theatre productions with colleagues (Jay Emmanuel’s Beneath the Music, Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa…). Sometimes, all of the above (the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, Electric Birds of Pothakudi…).
Ken Cockburn is a poet and translator based in Edinburgh. After several years at the Scottish Poetry Library, since 2004 he has freelanced, working as a poet in education, care and community settings, and often collaborating with visual artists. He also runs Edinburgh Poetry Tours, guided walks with readings of poems in the city’s Old Town.
Liz Crichton is the Curator of Telos Box Gallery and Creative Director of Revelation Arts. She is an interdisciplinary artist based in St Andrews where she curates the Telos Box. Inspired by encounters with people, nature, and her own spiritual journey, she works with a variety of media and in participation with the public to present an alternative perspective on the everyday, seeking to inspire others to step out beyond what they know for certain. https://www.revelationarts.org.uk/ https://www.instagram.com/eliz.crichton/
Marjorie Lotfi was born in New Orleans, moved to Tehran as a baby with her American mother and Persian father, and fled Iran with one suitcase and an hour’s notice during the Iranian Revolution. After waiting with family for her father’s return in her mother’s tiny hometown in Ohio, she lived in different parts of the US before moving to New York as a young lawyer in 1996 and then back and forth to the UK, settling in the UK in 1999, and in Scotland in 2005. She now lives between Edinburgh and Galloway.
Marjorie is one of the ILX 10 ‘Rising Stars of UK Writing’, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a member of Writer’s Mosaic. Her poems have been published widely, most recently on London’s Poems on the Underground, included in Best Scottish Poems and performed on BBC Radio Scotland/BBC Radio 4. Marjorie was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and is a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.
Marjorie was one of the three winners of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize in 2021, and her first book-length collection, The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. It is also a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, and is on the Longlist for the 2024 Saltire Prize for Best Poetry Book of the Year.
Marjorie also Co-Founded the Belonging Project with Heshani Sothiraj Eddleston, considering the experiences of refugees with over 1,500 participants across Scotland, and is a Co-Founder and Director of the charity Open Book.
Meg Bateman, born Edinburgh 1959, has recently retired from lecturing in Gaelic, which she learned in South Uist and Aberdeen University, at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, in Skye.Her poetry collections are Òrain Ghaoil/Amhráin Ghrá (1989), Aotromachd/Lightness (1997), Soirbheas/ Fair Wind (2007) and Transparencies (2013).She has co-edited and translated five anthologies of historical Gaelic verse, and with John Purser, she wrote Window-to-the-West on Culture and Environment in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd.
Nazaret Ranea is a poet from Málaga, Spain, based in Edinburgh. Named one of Scotland’s Next Generation Young Makars, her work explores nostalgia, memory, and home, blending personal and universal experiences. Her debut collection, Nettles, is forthcoming with Drunk Muse Press. Published in over fifty international journals, Nazaret is also the creator of the zines My Men and My Women and editor of For Those Who Tend the Soil, an anthology with the Scottish Poetry Library. She performs at spoken word events, facilitates workshops, and has been featured on BBC Radio Scotland and at the Edinburgh Fringe and International Book Festival.
Pascale Petit was born in Paris and lives in Cornwall. Her latest poetry collection, Beast, published by Bloodaxe in 2025, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her novel, My Hummingbird Father, was published by Salt in 2024. She has published nine collections, four of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Mama Amazonica won the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the inaugural Laurel Prize for eco-poetry, and Tiger Girl was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Wales Book of the Year.
Rachael Boast (b. 1975) is a poet and editor. Her fifth poetry collection, Volvelle, is due from Picador in July 2026. She is editor of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2025), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in Suffolk.
Robert Crawford’s nine collections of poetry in English include ‘The Scottish Ambassador’ (Cape, 20i8) and, most recently, ‘Old World’ (Cape, 2025). He also writes in Scots. His work has been awarded the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year award, and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Biographies he has written include ‘The Bard: Robert Burns’ (Cape, 2009), ‘Young Eliot’ (Cape, 2015) and ‘Eliot After The Waste Land’ (Cape, 2022). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he lives in Edinburgh.
Stephanie Burt is a poet and academic. She is the author of Randall Jarrell and His Age, The Art of the Sonnet and Advice from the Lights. Her book about Taylor Swift, Taylor’s Version, was published in October 2025.
[BIO COMING SOON]
