For two decades or more, the name Henry Normal was most often associated with an illustrious string of hit television comedies such as The Mrs Merton Show, The Royle Family, The Mighty Boosh and Gavin and Stacey. His roles on these shows included various combinations of creator, writer, script edito...

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I am an unashamed fan of Matthew Paul’s poetry – so to describe his second collection as long-awaited is no exaggeration, as far as I am concerned. I gladly undertook the train journey from Northumber...

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Poetry was the support act in Hexham on Saturday when novelist David Wiliams re-launched a novel he first published in 2012, to mark this year’s bicentenary of the Stockton & Darlington, the world’s f...

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Henry Normal is a stand-up comic supreme, who with fellow poet Brian Bilston, has been attracting bumper and appreciative audiences during the pair’s current tour.

He has maintained a prolific outp...

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Leah Larwood is an award-winning poet, a freelance writer and a gestalt psychotherapist. She has an MA in creative writing and her poems have won or been placed in a number of poetry competitions. One...

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When I retired from my newspaper job a dozen or so years ago, and was looking forward to pursuing my new life as a poet, of sorts, my colleagues gave me as one of my parting gifts a copy of the select...

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Victoria Gatehouse is a zoologist, award-winning poet and children’s writer. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC radio and published in several leading magazines. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (...

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This collection of one hundred short poems is inspired by the life of Carmelite nun Thérèse of Lisieux, who died in 1897 aged just 24. In her elegant introduction to the poems, Sarah Law explains how ...

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Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and now lives in Broadstairs, Kent. She has won the Guyana Prize for Literature, was regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2014, and won the Wales Poet...

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This first full-length collection by Cardiff-based poet Emily Cotterill follows on from her debut poetry pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants published by Smith / Doorstop in 2019 which was selected by...

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It was a foggy night on Teesside and a warm if slightly melancholy evening for the final farewell of Smokestack Books, which publisher Andy Croft closed for new titles last Christmas after 20 years. P...

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All good things must come to an end – or at least, a pause, in the case of Hexham’s very popular poetry event Words on the Wall. There was an impressive turnout for what masterly compere Joe Williams ...

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Sometimes slim volumes open up much bigger worlds and pack a punch beyond 30 pages of text. The title and the cover of Janus suggest a gaze, both forward and backward. The structure of the book, thoug...

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An important aspect of the poetry of Audrey Ardern-Jones is its humanity. Perhaps it is a failure of mine, to perceive it that often in the poems of others. Certainly, in Time in Pleats and Folds, it ...

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These are poems that you have to take time to, make time to read. I began by leafing through this Bloodaxe anthology – subtitled “Nourishing Poems of Hope and Light” – and thinking, these are all too ...

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“Just write, write, write, into the void. You have your unique way of telling that story. Your way of telling that story is important.”  … “I’m a slow writer. I’m reluctant to let drafts go out into t...

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‘The Hottentot Venus’ was Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was displayed at freak shows around 19th century Europe. It’s not ‘woke’ to draw attention to this; it’s an amazing and...

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Irish-born Pratibha Castle, who currently resides in Sussex, holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Chichester. A former singer, artist and holistic therapy workshop facilit...

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Patrick Osada’s collection The Warfield Poems is a lament for his village in Berkshire that over the last few decades has largely been swallowed up by the “tentacles” of housing development reaching o...

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Some traditions simply refuse to die. Back in 2010 Write Out Loud’s website founder Julian Jordon inaugurated the first Write Out Loud open-mic poetry jam at the Tunnel End Inn during Marsden jazz fes...

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Originally from Greater Manchester, Ron Scowcroft has lived in the Lancaster area since 1985. After a career in teaching and academic research, he began writing poetry in 2006. He is the author of two...

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Weighing in at over 600 pages, this is a substantial volume. Too big to be delivered through the letterbox, but handed in at the front door, it has given me an opportunity to renew my acquaintance wit...

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Katrina Naomi grew up close to the sea in Margate and now lives in Cornwall, where she combines her love of writing with sea swimming and a passion for wild places. Her poetry collections have won Aut...

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“It was the perfect tree, in the perfect place.” So said poet, performer, writer and broadcaster Kate Fox, in launching a book of poems at Waterstones in Newcastle to commemorate the shocking felling ...

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Lorcán Black, an Irish poet now living in London, is a Pushcart prize and Best of the Net nominee, and has been longlisted and shortlisted for the Two Sylvias prize and the Paris literary prize respec...

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Amble, for those that don’t know it, is a small town on Northumberland’s North Sea coast. There are parts of it that have seen better days. But there are other parts, including some colourful flats by...

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You could be forgiven for mistaking the Waddington Street Centre in Durham for just another terrace house at first glance, were it not for the Poetry Jam notice on the front door. Inside, the daytime ...

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This collection of snapshots from Neil Leadbeater is as clean-cut as the jewels that inspire ‘Diversion’, the fourth of its five sections. His perceptions alive to the details that assemble the world ...

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In his latest collection, the title of which is a partial echo of Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and Richard Murphy’s ‘Sailing to an Island’, Mervyn Linford, who is himself 45% Irish, according to a DN...

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It is 1961. Aldous Huxley and his wife Laura flee the Hollywood Hills as a devastating wildfire rips through one of the most affluent areas of Los Angeles. What can they save of their lives? This is t...

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Author, poet, editor, librettist and literary critic Grahame Davies was brought up in the former coal-mining village of Coedpoeth, near Wrexham, in north-east Wales. His former career as a journalist ...

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In the heady days of the 1960s veteran north-east poet Tom Pickard was a kind of culture warrior, even though he may not have seen it in quite those terms at the time. But at an event to celebrate the...

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What are we doing to the planet? What is technology doing to us? These are the common themes, according to the poet herself, within the new collection of poetry by Katrina Porteous, who might well be ...

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The poems in Heather Cook’s debut pamphlet may deal with apparently ‘ordinary’ subjects, but they are certainly not run of the mill. I first read these poems a year ago, when I provided one of the end...

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It was just over a month ago that the poet laureate Simon Armitage launched Blossomise, a collection in celebration of spring, with illustrations by Angela Harding, and in collaboration with the Natio...

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I don’t usually kick off a review of a poetry night by writing about a musician – but in the case of Rod Clements, a founder member of the legendary Tyneside band Lindisfarne and writer of the much-lo...

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I began to read this collection from the end first. Don’t ask me why, it’s not something I usually do. Perhaps it’s because Dave Morgan and I are both of a certain age. The final poem, ‘Bravado’, star...

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