John Challis’s debut pamphlet Black Cab (Poetry Saltzburg, 2017), was a New Writing North Read Regional title. His first full collection was The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe, 2021). He has been highly commended by the Forward prize, and this second collection The Green Parcel, also published by Blooda...

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Pamela Gormally lives in Alnwick, Northumberland, and holds an MA in creative writing from Newcastle University. She won first prize in the Sonnet or Not competition 2022 and third prize in the Hippoc...

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Evidence of a disciplined religious upbringing betrays itself in the titles and subject matter of a number of poems at the start of this collection. Elsewhere, there are  echoes of the first lines of ...

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Maggie Mackay is from Dunfermline, and winds family history into her poems. She has been published in a number of print and online poetry magazines and journals. Her previous publications include a pa...

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Polly Atkin is an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer whose work focuses on nature, place and disability. Her previous poetry collections published with Seren include Basic Nest Architecture (20...

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Every year the US poet Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on New Year’s Day. One such poem concludes with the admonition: “Don’t despair of this falling world, not yet …” (‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, Wh...

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The news has become so bad it’s difficult to find the words to write about it. That’s how I feel, sometimes, at least. But luckily Attila the Stockbroker has not been left speechless. The veteran punk...

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“I knock on the door … I count to 45 in my head. I tell them I’m doing an art project, being a bit liberal with the truth. And then I do a poem to introduce myself.” Thus spoke Rowan McCabe, aka the D...

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It’s taken me a while to get round to writing this review of a momentous poetry gathering, but I couldn’t let it go unrecorded. On the last weekend in March around 40 poets and audience gathered at Wo...

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I have seen people physically moved by the ghosts that haunt the Newcastle Lit and Phil Library. One such apparition is said to be the ghost of the legendary Mrs Affleck. On Wednesday night she would ...

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Award-winning poet Tallulah Howarth celebrated the publication of her latest book An Alternative Xanadu this month with two launch events. The first was in her home city of Leeds last week and the Lon...

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Birmingham-based multidisciplinary artist and writer Rupinder Kaur Waraich is a BBC New Creative. Her one-woman show Imperfect, Perfect Woman was performed at Wolverhampton literature festival in 2022...

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This latest collection of poems by Surrey-based writer Jeremy Loynes follows on from his poetry pamphlet Turning which was published by Dempsey & Windle in 2018. In Wise as Water we discover similar p...

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This collection of poems by Adam Horovitz was inspired by the Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology of the Cotswolds exhibited at the Corinium museum, Cirencester, and the prehistoric and Roman artefac...

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Catherine Redford began writing after the early death of her partner and is now widely published. The Way the Water Held Me is her debut collection, dedicated to the memory of her partner, Rebecca Mar...

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Danish-born writer Pia Tafdrup is the author of over 20 collections of verse, which are often organised into themed sequences. Her latest is a series of five books on the human senses collectively ref...

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Cardiff-born writer, artist and musician Laura Wainwright grew up in Newport where she still lives. She has a PhD in English literature from Cardiff University where her thesis focused on Anglophone W...

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Martin Hayes was born in London and has lived around Edgware Road all his life. This major traffic artery running north from Marble Arch was once part of the Roman road Watling Street. Countless peopl...

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Ivan V Lalić (1931-1996) was born in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. The summers of his childhood were spent in western Serbia, an idyll that came to an abrupt end with the Nazi invasion i...

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Caroline Gill, who currently lives in Suffolk, grew up in London, Kent and Norfolk before moving with David, her archaeologist husband, to Rome, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge and Swansea. She graduat...

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William Martin (1952–2010) was born in the mining village of New Silksworth, then in County Durham, and later moved to Sunderland where he spent the last 50 years of his life. During the second world ...

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From mining and shipyards to wind power and other renewable energy, the Northumberland port of Blyth is changing. One encouraging sign of its regeneration is the town’s new Market Pavilion, a cinema a...

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Poems about bladderwrack, kelp, oysters, stones and coal dust found on a beach, and a skip full of seaweed have been published after a creative workshops project to raise awareness about coastal habit...

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When poet and publisher Tim Fellows looked out of his bedroom window as a boy, he saw the local colliery in his former mining area of north Derbyshire. Men on both sides of his family had been involve...

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Salford spoken word artist Kieren King is a leading slam performer who once said in an interview that he was inspired by the Bard of Salford, John Cooper Clarke. He has co-run the spoken word night Ev...

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Matthew Paul has had poems published in a number of leading magazines, and already has one excellent collection, The Evening Entertainment, to his name. His second, The Last Corinthians, builds upon h...

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I am a retired Teacher of the Deaf by profession, and volunteer as a table tennis coach at Brighton Table Tennis Club, where I help train the national Down Syndrome squad. We have table tennis session...

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This new collection from Emma Purshouse marks something of a departure from her previous work. It is partly inspired by the American poet William Matthews and, in particular, his poem ‘Morningside Hei...

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I attend a number of poetry events - but it’s not often that I find myself at an actual poetry ‘event’. This reading of Basil Bunting’s acclaimed long poem ‘Briggflatts’, by the eminent poet Sean O’Br...

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The title of this anthology, published by Dempsey and Windle under their Vole imprint, is taken from Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” and the image on the...

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London-born poet Gillian Allnutt spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. She read philosophy and English at Cambridge and lived for the next 17 years mostly in London. In 1988 she returned to...

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I’ve come across some slim volumes of poetry in my time, but this one is ridiculous. Release the Sausages! Poems for Keir Starmer boasts 20-odd pages, but apart from a preface from Andy Croft, all of ...

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Poetry doesn’t alter anything, right? As WH Auden more or less pronounced. In his foreword to Words on a NE Street, a remarkable anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets about the homeless, its instigator ...

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This was an eco-festival - with plenty of poetry - that put forward a positive view for the future of our world. Alnwick’s What a Wonderful World festival in Northumberland began on Thursday at Rothbu...

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Marilyn Longstaff lives in Darlington and is a member of Vane Women writing collective. In 2003, she received a Northern Promise Award from New Writing North, and her third poetry book Raiment (Smokes...

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The launch of Suzanna Fitzpatrick’s debut full collection Crippled in London on Tuesday evening came with a trigger warning. The book explores a childhood shadowed by a mother’s chronic illness, culmi...

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In her mid-20s, Len Pennie is already a poetry phenomenon. She became renowned on social media such as TikTok during lockdown for posting a "Scots word of the day" and poetry videos. Her debut collect...

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