| Archiving The Body: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh & Shash Trevett Sunday 29th June, 12pm Burgage Hall, Herefordshire, HR8 1DS The body holds memory, just as poetry holds history. Shash Trevett and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh explore displacement, violence, and survival, writing from the histories – past and present – of Tamil and Palestinian peoples. Their work considers how poetry can bring the archive to life, making the past present and the faraway close. Supported by the Hawthornden Foundation, and kindly sponsored by Ethos + John Burns. Shash Trevett is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in May 2021 by Smith|Doorstop. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe 2023, Penguin India 2023) which she co-edited with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne, was a Poetry Book Society Special Recommendation and one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2023. She is a member of the Kinara Poetry Collective, a Ledbury Critic and a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her first full collection The Naming of Names was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2024. This event is live-streamed on Vimeo also. More Details and Booking |
| 20 Minutes with…Shash Trevett Sunday 29th June, 5.20pm St Michael & All Angels Church, Herefordshire, HR8 1DL Join Tamil poet and translator Shash Trevett, author of The Naming of Names (Smith|Doorstop, 2024), for a casual ’20 Minutes with…’ session! More Details |
| Poetry Society New Poets Showcase: Tom Bailey, Freya Bantiff & Maureen Onwunali Saturday 5th July, 5pm Burgage Hall, Herefordshire, HR8 1DS Three exciting new poets recognised through Poetry Society talent development programmes: the National Poetry Competition, Canham Prize and Foyle Young Poets Award. Tom Bailey is based in Edinburgh. His debut pamphlet Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize. Climate-concerned Sheffield poet Freya Bantiff won the Poetry Business New Poets Prize with her pamphlet All Appear Ordinary. Maureen Onwunali is a Dublin-born Nigerian poet, author of the pamphlet Homegrown, and two-time National Slam champion. Quirky but connected, Freya Bantiff‘s poetry pamphlet All Appears Ordinary invites us to look again at the day-to-day aspects of our lives. All Appears Ordinary was a winner of the 2023 New Poets’ Prize. This event is live-streamed on Vimeo also. More Details and Booking |
| COAL Sunday 6th July, 5pm Community Hall, Herefordshire, HR8 2AE In collaboration with the National Coal Mining Museum, the Poetry Business have gathered poems and photographs for COAL, a remarkable book about miners and mining communities before, during and after the Strike. It features outstanding and often moving poems by among many others Simon Armitage, Liz Berry, Duncan Bush, Gillian Clarke, Maura Dooley, Ian McMillan and Helen Mort. Engaging readings, together with slides of images by celebrated photographers John Harris, Keith Pattison and Brenda Prince. Kindly sponsored by BRM. Ann and Peter Sansom, Co-Directors of The Poetry Business in Sheffield, and co-editor Sarah Wimbush will read work included in this powerful anthology. Sarah Wimbush is a Leeds poet who hails from Doncaster. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Bloodlines, won the Mslexia/PBS Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2019 and was published in 2020 by Seren. In 2020 she was a winner in The Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition with The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster. Her first book-length collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022. STRIKE, her book of poems with documentary photographs marking the 40th anniversary of the 1984 Miners’ Strike, was published by Stairwell Books in 2024. More Details and Booking |