2025 Festival Artists
Alice Willitts, poet, plantswoman and mother from the Fens. Her forthcoming collection Kiss My Earth (Blue Diode) follows competition wins for With Love and Dear. She is the co-author of Something Light Written, and Think Thing: an ecopoetry practice (Elephant Press). Creator / editor of DIRT plantable poetry with Dialect Press, she runs the 57 Poetry Collective and is a founding member of the biodiversity project On The Verge in Cambridge.
A writer, translator and cultural project leader, Annie Rutherford makes things with words and champions poetry and translated literature in all its guises. Her published translations include full collections by poets Nora Gomringer and Volha Hapeyeva. Formerly assistant director at StAnza, Annie is currently a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorships at the National Centre for Writing, and is a 2025 translator-in-residence for the British Centre for Literary Translation.
Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. Her selected poems, Rookie (2022), and The Air Year (2020) are two of Carcanet’s most popular books of the present decade. She won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2020, and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the TS Eliot Prize, the Costa Book Awards, the Ted Hughes Award, the Polari Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was fifteen. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. Her seventh collection, Ambush at Still Lake, was published in June 2024.
Deborah Moffatt was born in Vermont, USA, and has lived in Scotland since 1982. She writes in English and in Gaelic, and has published four collections of poetry. Her most recent books are Càirdeas ‘s Comain ‘s Eòlas, (Clàr, Inverness, 2024) and Eating Thistles, (Smokestack, Ripon, 2019.) She has worked as a journalist, mainly in Latin America, and also as dancer and a musician.
Don Mee Choi is a translator and highly innovative poet. Her work slips between forms, mixing poetry, lyric essay, memoir, and visual image. Incorporating archives, photographs and fragments of memory, Choi’s poetry explores historical events and the human impact of war. Her books include DMZ Colony, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Her translations of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry won the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
Gwyneth Lewis MBE was the first National Poet of Wales and wrote the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. She’s won the Wales Book of the Year for poetry in English and in Welsh and was awarded a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. Her latest books are Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (Calon, 2024), a memoir about emotional abuse and First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe, 2025).
Hannah Silva is a writer and performer working in sound poetry, radio and experimental non-fiction. Their eighth BBC radio play, “An Artificially Intelligent Guide to Love” was the starting point for My Child, the Algorithm (Footnote Press/Soft Skull) – Silva’s questioning of love and queer single parenting is woven into surreal and funny contributions by a predecessor of ChatGPT, and a toddler (a Granta Book of the Year 2023). Silva’s record Talk in a bit was in the Wire’s Top 25 Albums of 2018. Their story “A Single Parent Flat Hunting on Universal Credit, London 2023” was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Reporting Homelessness.
Helena Fornells Nadal is a Catalan poet based in Edinburgh. She is currently engaged in creative research on the intersection between land politics and ecopoetics. Her work has appeared in publications including Harana Poetry, Magma, Finished Creatures, The Interpreter’s House, Gutter, Interpret, New Writing Scotland, and PROTOTYPE 6.
Janette Ayachi (1982 – ) BA (English Lit. / Film Media, Stirling University) MSc (Creative Writing, Edinburgh University) is a Scottish-Algerian poet. She’s a regular on BBC arts programmes & collaborates with artists & performs at festivals internationally. Her first poetry book Hand Over Mouth Music (Pavilion, Liverpool University Press) won the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Literary Award 2019. Her book QuickFire, Slow Burning (Pavilion, LUP) was longlisted for The Laurel Prize and shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards 2024. She’s now writing her travel memoir Lonerlust & her debut fiction novel Of Sweet Figs and Forget-Me-Nots.
Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection, C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024 and was named Guardian Book of the Month and a Spectator Book of the Year. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Excellence and was also included in the Independent’s 2024 Pride Power list.
Kathleen Jamie is a poet, essayist and editor. In August 2021, Jamie was appointed the Makar or National Poet for Scotland for a three-year term. In this role, Jamie has curated collective poems from lines submitted by the people of Scotland. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Bonniest Company (Picador, 2015), Waterlight: Selected Poems (2007), and The Tree House (2004), which won the Forward Prize for best poetry collection of the year, and a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. Three of her collections have been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Kevin Mclean is an award-winning spoken word poet, the Creative Director of I Am Loud, and the host of Scotland’s premiere spoken word night Loud Poets.
He has directed, produced, and performed work at the Brighton, Edinburgh, and Prague Fringe Festivals, Glastonbury Festival, StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Leicester’s Find The Right, Words, STV’s The Late Show, and BBC Radio Scotland’s Culture Show.
Lisa Fannen shares poems solo and with musicians/sound makers, including as part of the duo Claquer with Jer Reid, and through performance across discipline integrating poetry, music, dance and film. Her poetry collection Faultline was released as a collaborative recording project. Lisa is also a bodyworker and activist concerned with dialogue and information exchange about health in the context of social justice and has published related writing including the book Warp & Weft: psycho-emotional health, politics and experiences.
Mary Ruefle 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).
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His first poetry collection, Moontide, was published by Bloodaxe Books and won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire First Book of the Year. Noctuary, his second collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2019. A selection from these first two books were published in the U.S. as First Nights, part of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound, was published in September 2024.
Patrick James Errington is a multi-award-winning poet, translator, and researcher. His recent collection, the swailing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2023) won the 2024 John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of Year 2023. His translation of French-Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks is forthcoming from NYRB. Born in Canada, Patrick now lives in Scotland where he teaches writing and researches poetics, literary theory, and cognitive neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh.
Raymond Antrobus has published three poetry collections, The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018), All The Names Given (Picador, 2021) and Signs, Music (Picador, 2024), for which he has won the Ted Hughes, Somerset Maugham and Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Awards. He became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize (2019) for best work of literature in any genre. His poetry is studied at GCSE in schools and colleges, and he is also author of two children’s picturebooks, Can Bears Ski? (Walker Books, 2022), the first story to be broadcast on the BBC entirely in British Sign Language, and Terrible Horses (Walker Books, 2024) which was shortlisted for an Inclusive Books for Children Award 2025. Antrobus is an advocate for several D/deaf charities, including DeafKidz International and the National Deaf Children’s Society. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021.
Sanah Ahsan is a poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah’s work plays in the wild terrain of woundedness, the sacred landscapes of falling apart, centering compassion and embracing each other’s madness. Their work draws on therapeutics, embodiment and poetics as life-affirming practices. Some of Sanah’s media work includes writing for The Guardian, delivering a TED talk, and presenting a Channel 4 documentary on the over-medicalisation of people’s distress. Sanah is working on a non-fiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions. Sanah’s debut poetry collection I cannot be good until You say it was published with Bloomsbury March 2024, shortlisted for The Forward Prize, and selected as one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry books.
Selima Hill received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University in 2003-06. She won first prize in the Arvon International Poetry Competition with part of The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness (1989), one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008), which also includes work from Saying Hello at the Station (1984), My Darling Camel (1988), A Little Book of Meat (1993), Aeroplanes of the World (1994), Violet (1997), Bunny (2001), Portrait of My Lover as a Horse (2002), Lou-Lou (2004) and Red Roses (2006). Violet was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for all three of the UK’s major poetry prizes, the Forward Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award. Bunny won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lou-Lou and The Hat were Poetry Book Society Recommendations.
Tim Tim Cheng (she/they) is the author of The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her pamphlet, Tapping at Glass (Verve, 2023), was shortlisted for The Kavya Prize and named one of The Poetry Society’s Books of the Year. She co-edited Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology (Verve, 2023). Born and raised in Hong Kong, she translates between Chinese and English. Her writing has been supported by the likes of Scottish Book Trust, Arts Council England, Southbank Centre, and The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Visit her online at timtimcheng.com.
Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the poetry collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon Books and YesYes Books) and a part of the nature writing project, Field Notes Collective. Her non-fiction debut A Beautiful and Vital Place won the 2023 Nan Shepherd Prize and is forthcoming with Canongate. Alycia currently teaches on the Creative Writing master’s at the University of Cambridge.
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 will be released this April.
CHARLOTTE VAN DEN BROECK was born in Turnhout, Belgium, in 1991, and lives in Antwerp. She has published three collections of poetry in Dutch: Kameleon (2015), which was awarded the Herman de Coninck debut prize for poetry by a Flemish author; Nachtroer (2017), nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize 2018 and the Ida Gerhard Prize; and Aarduitwrijvingen (2021). The first two volumes are combined in Chameleon | Nachtroer, published by Bloodaxe in 2020. David Colmer’s translation of Aarduitwrijvingen is published by Bloodaxe in 2025 under the title The Inside of a Stone. In 2022, David McKay’s translation of her prose book Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy (Waagstukken) was published by Chatto.
Desree is an award-winning writer, spoken word artist, educator, and producer from London and Slough. An alumna of Born::Free, Jerwood Arts, and the Obsidian Foundation, she was Poet in Residence at Glastonbury 2022 and EMPOWORD. Her work has featured on Sky Arts, BBC Radio Berkshire, and in JOY//US Poems of Queer Joy, Ink Sweat & Tears, and more. Her debut poetry collection, Altar will be published by Bad Betty Press in Spring 2025.
Gaelle Chassery is a sensory artist who enjoys creating interactive tactile pieces to explore the reframing of simple joys as tools for healing through presence. Her work invites recontextualisation of objects and experiences: connecting to ourselves and nature via the senses to rediscover what it means to welcome embodied living.
Hannah Copley is the author of Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021); and Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry, LUP, 2024). The latter, which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize and was nominated for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize. Her latest project is a collaboration with the poet Alycia Pirmohamed for DIRT. Hannah is a poetry editor at Stand magazine and also runs a regular poetry night at the Soho Poly. She works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster.
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Her latest book is the poetry collection Them! (Picador 2024). Her verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador 2021) won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. Her poetry collections The Games (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and Tonguit (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Her stage show of her poetry sequence Drone toured internationally in 2019, and the performance of Deep Wheel Orcadia will tour in 2025. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. www.harryjosephine.com
Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, Chancellor of Newcastle University since 2020. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. Her poems have featured on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.
Jasmine Cooray is a poet and psychotherapist. Her debut poetry collection Inheritance was published with Bad Betty Press in November 2023 and received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was also shortlisted for a 2024 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She can often be found up a tree, or elaborately collaging a bird.
Julie Laing is a Glasgow-based writer and artist. She won the 2023 William Bonar Poetry Prize, Wigtown Poetry Prize 2022 and is runner-up of the erbacce prize for poetry 2024. Her poem, livestream, hope street, was selected as one of Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems and she was mentored through the St Mungo Mirrorball’s Clydebuilt 13 verse apprenticeship scheme. Her debut pamphlet, the edge of rhizome, is forthcoming with Red Squirrel Press. Other work has been published in New Writing Scotland, Gutter magazine, The Edwin Morgan Centenary Collection and elsewhere. She co-hosts off-page visual poetry programme with CD Boyland.
Dr. Katie Ailes is a poet, researcher, producer, and educator focusing on spoken word poetry. Since 2015 she has worked with I Am Loud in multiple capacities, including as a producer, publicist, and performer, and she directs our educational programming.
Katie has co-devised and performed spoken word shows with Loud Poets across the UK, including at the Edinburgh, Prague, and Brighton Fringe Festivals. Her poetry has been published widely and her poem “Outwith” was chosen as one of the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best of the Best Scottish Poems in 2019. In 2023 she served as the Glastonbury Festival Poet in Residence.
Kim Hyesoon, born in 1955, is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary poets of South Korea. She was the first woman poet to receive the prestigious Kim Su-yong and Midang awards. In Don Mee Choi’s translations, her Autobiography of Death (2018) was the winner of the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize and Phantom Pain Wings won the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the first time a translated title has won the award. Her poetry has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Danish, and Swedish.
Luis García Montero is a Spanish writer whose work includes poetry, novels, essays, song lyrics, and literary scholarship. He spearheaded a literary movement in Spain known as the Poetry of Experience and is head of Spain’s Instituto Cervantes.
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.
Odile Kennel is a poet, novelist and translator based in Berlin. She writes in German and French and likes to invite other languages into her texts. Most recently, she published the essay Lust (2021) and the poetry collection irgendetwas dazwischen (2023) (both Verlagshaus Berlin). In 2013, she worked with Anna Crowe on mutual translations as part of the Versschmuggel project. In 2022, she received the Paul Scheerbart Prize for her poetry translations. something in between received the Dörlemann Prize of the Hotlist of Independent Publishers in 2024.
Paul Farley is a poet and broadcaster who has received widespread acclaim for his work, including the Whitbread Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Cholmondeley Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. He has published six books with Picador, including a Selected Poems in 2014. His new book is When It Rained for a Million Years (2025).
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.
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, and an essayist. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature, the National Medal of Arts, and 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
For StAnza 2025, Sandra reads two poems from her long-awaited collection, Woman Without Shame – her first in 28 years – as part of our Hold the Phone installation on Sunday 16th March.
The Poetry DJ is a new venture by CD Boyland – poet/visual poet and editor. His debut, full-length poetry collection Mephistopheles (Blue Diode, 2023) was long-listed for a Scottish National Book Award. He is currently Co-editor of the Glasgow Review of Books, a partner in the Glasgow-based visual poetry practice off-page and a Trustee of the Edwin Morgan Trust.
Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.
Fife Writes aims to provide opportunities for local writers of all kinds and abilities to improve their writing and to perform in front of live audiences if they wish. Our main purpose is to encourage involvement and provide the opportunity to write and perform. We aim to be a peer support group for writers of all genres and to encourage each other to write and share our work. We hold events such as storytelling, short stories, novels, poetry, performance and music across Fife where we invite readers and performers from the very inexperienced to full professionals. We also hold creative writing workshops and other events to support writers across Fife.
Anna Crowe is a poet and internationally-recognised translator. In 1998 she co-founded StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, and was Artistic Director for the first seven years. Her work has been recorded for the Poetry Archive and translated into several languages. She was twice awarded the Peterloo Poetry Prize, and has received a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. She has published three full collections.
Beth Godfrey is a poet, performer, and workshop facilitator, and winner of StAnza’s 2023 poetry slam. She uses her background in theatre and performance to support self-expression and group connection. Her work can be found across a number of anthologies.
Christopher Whyte has published four novels in English and ten poetry collections in Gaelic. He has also translated seven books of the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva from Russian into English, as well as editing Dàin do Eimhir and An Cuilithionn 1939 by Sorley MacLean and producing the monographic study Modern Scottish Poetry.
Dominika Jackowska is a Polish, Edinburgh-based workshop facilitator, Animator and Motion Designer. Specialising in traditional stop-motion and 2D hand-drawn animation, she has worked on a diverse range of projects. These projects have included motion design, projections, story lead short animations, music lead projects, animation work for digital theatre performance and short films.
GZL is a self-publishing library and community arts space in Govanhill, Glasgow, established in 2018. We are the largest independent zine library in the UK with an international collection of over 3,500 zines (self-published magazines). These zines inspire our activities:
* We run Glasgow Zine Fest, an annual celebration of zine culture.
* Arts and Heritage Programmes of talks, workshops and screenings.
* A Community-Led Programme hosting local creative groups and events.
* Professional development opportunities: residencies, commissions, interns, volunteers.
* Library & Archive Resources: a free making room, arts materials, printer, desktop and more.
Our events are free or pay-what-you-can with access provisions. We welcome around 6,000 people each year, across over 150 events, delivered in partnership with hundreds of artists.
Hannah Lavery is a poet and playwright from Edinburgh. Her debut poetry collection Blood Salt Spring (Polygon) was nominated for a Saltire Prize in 2022, her second collection Unwritten Woman was published by Polygon in August 2024. Hannah is the former Makar (poet laureate) for the City of Edinburgh, co-host of feminist arts podcast QuineCast and was an Associate Artist at National Theatre Scotland (NTS). Her plays for NTS The Drift and Lament for Sheku Bayoh and The Protest have toured extensively. Hannah lives, breathes and dreams on the beaches and cliffs of Scotland’s East Coast, with her dreaming often taking her back to the streets and closes of Edinburgh.
Helen Calcutt is an award-winning poet and choreographer. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and Artistic Director of dance-theatre company ‘Beyond Words’. Her writing has been published globally. Somehow (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), was a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020). Anthology Eighty-Four (Verve Press, 2019), created in aid of the suicide prevention charity C.A.L.M. was a Saboteur Award shortlist & a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, 2019. Her full-length collection Feeling All the Kills was published by Pavilion Poetry, April 2024. Helen’s notable research into text-to-dance translation is funded by Arts Council England & supported by the Birmingham REP Theatre, and One Dance U.K. She is currently creating a dance adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Helen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Loughborough University for her outstanding contribution to the arts, December 2023.
Jackie Kay is a poet, playwright and novelist. She was the Scots Makar between 2016 and 2021. Her poetry collections include Darling: New and Selected Poems (2007), and Fiere (2011), which reflects on her Nigerian and Scottish heritage. Her memoir Red Dust Road (2010), which she has called a ‘love letter’ to her white adoptive parents, won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year Award in 2011. Her collection, The Empathetic Store (Mariscat, 2015), features poems from her residency at the Ardtornish Estate.
JLM Morton is from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Berlin Lit, Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, Modron and elsewhere. Highly commended by the Forward Prizes, she is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Laurie Lee, Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview prizes. Her first poetry collection is Red Handed, out now with Broken Sleep Books (2024). Juliette has collaborated with musicians, artists and field recordists and held residencies at the Cotswold Water Park, Stroudwater Textile Trust, Corinium Museum and a community woodland, Sladebank Woods.
Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of seven literary anthologies. Shortlisted for the Forward Felix Dennis and Jerwood Prizes, her debut An Aviary of Small Birds tells the story of losing a son in childbirth and was an Observer Book of the Year. Her latest, Seasonal Disturbances, explores gentrification, the city and the sacred, was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecological poetry and excerpted in the Financial Times and the Guardian.
Katie Fowlie is an art specialist, educator and forager. She facilitates a range of creative public engagement projects across settings and is a beachcomber. Fowlie has undertaken a range of artist residencies, and this year’s StAnza festival image is of some of her vibrant beach finds.
Len Pennie is a poet who writes in both English and the Scots language. She writes passionately about the promotion of minority languages, survivors of domestic abuse, and the destigmatisation of mental illness.
Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His collection The Remaining Men (Cinnamon Press) was published in 2024. He Lives in Norwich with Helen Ivory and sciatica.
Nuala Watt lives in Glasgow. She is a Quaker and disability activist. Her first poetry collection The Department of Work and Pensions Assesses a Jade Fish was shortlisted for Saltire First Book of the Year.
Pádraig Ó Tuama (b. 1975, Ireland) is a poet with interests in conflict, religion, and language. He has been published in Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland, Gutter and elsewhere. Kitchen Hymns (CHEERIO 2025) is his most recent poetry collection. He presents Poetry Unbound from On Being Studios, from which two anthologies have come, both published (2022 and 2025) with Canongate. He lives in Belfast and New York City.
Dr Peter Mackay is the current Scottish Makar and is a Senior Lecturer in Literature in the School of English at The University of St Andrews. Originally from the Isle of Lewis, he is an expert in Scottish and Irish literature from 1800 onwards, and especially in Scottish Gaelic literature. He has written two monographs, This Strange Loneliness: Heaney’s Wordsworth (McGill-Queen’s 2021) and Sorley MacLean (RIISS 2010). An anthology he edited with Iain S MacPherson, An Leabhar Liath: 500 years of Gaelic Love and Transgressive Verse (Luath 2015) won the Donald Meek Prize for Gaelic literature and the Saltire Scottish Research Book of the Year; another anthology co-edited with Jo MacDonald, 100 Dàn as Fheàrr Leinn / 100 Favourite Gaelic Poems won the Duais Ruaraidh MhicThòmais in 2021. His poetry collections Gu Leòr / Galore (Acair 2015) and Nàdur de / Some Kind of (Acair 2020) were shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Poetry Book of the Year; Nàdur de was also longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. An AHRC / BBC Next Generation Thinker, he is a frequent broadcaster on Radio 3 and BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.
Poet, non-fiction author and novelist with close links to Greece, India and wildlife. She has won the National Poetry Competition and published thirteen acclaimed poetry collections, most recently Girl – from Mary in the Annunciation to fairy tales, Indian goddesses, the Urban Dictionary, an ancient Greek snake goddess, and memories of herself, her mother and daughter. She has sung in a Turkish nightclub, played viola in Westminster Abbey, is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London, Professor of Poetry Emerita at King’s College London, and currently divides her time between London, Cambridge and Leith.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and a translator of Russian-language literature. She has published six collections of poetry with Carcanet, most recently The Strongbox (2024). Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ‘Joy’ won a Forward Prize in 2016. As a translator she has specialised in women’s writing and her published poetry translations have all been PBS Choices. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose In Memory of Memory (2021) was shortlisted for the International Booker, the James Tait Black Prize and others.
Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and creative practitioner. A poem from her first collection In Search of Equilibrium is in the UK’s GCSE syllabus. Her second poetry collection is Ceremony for the Nameless. She was previously the Young People’s Laureate for London. As a practitioner she has worked on projects by Dulwich Picture Gallery, Hackney Museum, and was poet-in-residence at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Her writing has been commissioned by Selfridges and Rimowa. She often combines poetry with music and visual art. She holds an Mst in Creative Writing from University of Oxford.
Vahid Davar is the author of two poetry books in Persian and a poetry pamphlet in English. Sefr-e Safar (The Book of Journeys, 2018), Davar’s debut poetry collection, was highly commended by the 2019 Shamlou Prize. His second book, Ahd-e Nassim (Nassim’s Testament, 2019) is included in the British Museum exhibit, Atlas of the World, 2022. In November 2022, Davar’s essay, Relation to Relating: A Sketch for the New Epic, won the University of Oklahoma’s Farzaneh Prize for best article on Persian literature. Something the Colour of Pines on Fire, a pamphlet of his self-translated poems, was published by Matecznik in 2022.
