Please note: Meryl Pugh will no longer appear due to illness, and Annie Rutherford is now reading at this event.

Lisa Kelly, author of the upcoming collection The House of the Interpreter (Carcanet), and Laurel Prize nominee Meryl Pugh share a selection of their poems. Kelly’s work explores forms of resistance through uncommon modes of communication, drawing on her experience of single-sided deafness and her knowledge of British Sign Language and her research into the wild world of fungi. Pugh will be reading from her first collection, Natural Phenomena, alongside brand-new poems, investigating the urban wild, its uneasy negotiations with the human, and the quiet resistance of making a place one’s home.

Lisa Kelly is co-Chair of Magma Poetry, and co-editor of What Meets the Eye, an anthology of poetry and short fiction by UK D/deaf and Hard of Hearing writers. Meryl Pugh teaches for the Poetry School, and her non-fiction debut, Feral Borough, was published in 2022 by Penned in the Margins.