Headliners
Photo credit: Adrian Pope
Mary Jean Chan
Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche, published by Faber & Faber (2019) and Faber USA (2020). Flèche won the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2021, Flèche was selected as a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Poetry. Chan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University and a contributing editor at Oxford Poetry.
Photo credit: Matt Hass
Dean Atta
Dean Atta’s debut poetry collection, I Am Nobody's Nigger, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize and his debut novel, The Black Flamingo, won the Stonewall Book Award. He was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday. Dean’s work often deals with themes of gender, identity, race and growing up – and has appeared on BBC One, BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, and Channel 4. Dean regularly performs across the UK, and internationally. He is a member of Malika's Poetry Kitchen. Dean is based in Glasgow, and is Co-director of the Scottish BAME Writers Network and a patron of LGBT+ History Month.
Photo credit: Rich Dyson
Harry Josephine Giles
Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Their verse novel Deep Wheel Orcadia is coming out with Picador in October 2021. Their 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. They have a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Their show Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally, and their performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category. www.harryjosephine.com
Jay Gao
Jay Gao is a Chinese-Scottish poet and MFA student at Brown University. His publications include Granta, The Guardian, The White Review, The Poetry Review, and 3:AM Magazine. He is the author of two pamphlets: Wedding Beasts (2019) and Katabasis (2020). He is a Contributing Editor for The White Review.
Photo credit: Adrian Pope
Andrew McMillan
Andrew McMillan's first collection, physical, was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award; it also won a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Northern Writers' Award and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize. He is a senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His third collection is pandemonium (2021, Jonathan Cape).
Photo credit: Sarah Golightley
Nat Raha
Nat Raha is a poet and queer/trans activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh. She is the author of three collections of poetry including of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and Octet (Veer Books, 2010). Her creative and critical writing has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Poetry Review, MAP Magazine, The New Feminist Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2020), and Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021). With Fiona Anderson and Glyn Davis, she co-edited 'Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now', a special issue of Third Text journal (January 2021). Nat is a Research Fellow on the 'Life Support: Forms of Care in Art and Activism' project at the University of St Andrews, which will open an exhibition at Glasgow Women's Library in August 2021. She co-edits Radical Transfeminism Zine.
Christopher Whyte
Christopher Whyte has so far published 7 collections of poems in Scottish Gaelic, most recently Ceum air cheum / Step By Step (2019) and Leanabachd a' Cho-Ghleusaiche (2020). He is the author of four novels in English, which include The Warlock of Strathearn (1997) and The Gay Decameron (1998) and has also translated five books of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva's work from Russian into English. Last to appear was Youthful Verses (2020). He abandoned a distinguished academic career to write full time in 2005 and since then has been based in Budapest, Hungary. www.christopherwhyte.com
Photo credit: Roman Manfredi
Joelle Taylor
Joelle Taylor is an award-winning poet and author who prior to the pandemic completed a world tour with her collection Songs My Enemy Taught Me. She founded SLAMbassadors, the UK national youth poetry slam championships, as well as the international spoken-word project Borderlines. She is widely anthologised, the author of 4 collections of poetry and is currently completing her debut collection of inter-connecting short stories The Night Alphabet. Her new book C+NTO & Othered Poems was published in June 2021 and is the subject of the Radio 4 arts documentary Butch. C+nto has been named by The Telegraph as one of the books of the year, as well as DIVA magazine's Book of the Month, and awarded 5 stars by the Morning Star. It has also been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2021. She has received a Changemaker Award from the Southbank Centre; a Fellowship of the RSA; and her poem Valentine was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize. She is a co-curator and host of Out-Spoken Live, a poetry and music club currently resident at the Southbank Centre; and the commissioning editor at Out-Spoken Press.
Photo credit: Lyndon Douglas
Patience Agbabi
Renowned for her performances on page and stage, Patience Agbabi's poems have been broadcast on television and radio all over the world. Her work has also appeared on the London Underground and human skin. In 2004 she was nominated one of the UK's Next Generation Poets, and in 2017 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has lectured in Creative Writing at several UK universities including Greenwich, Cardiff and Kent. She's published 4 poetry collections, R.A.W. (Gecko Press, 1995), Transformatrix (Canongate Books, 2000), Bloodshot Monochrome (Canongate, 2008), and Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. In 2018, she was writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She is currently a Fellow in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.