16 Days Festival: Joelle Taylor and others at Manchester Poetry Library

Brand new from Manchester Metropolitan University is a festival of poetry readings, panel discussions and creative workshops led by academics in the field to show how poems can inspire and change minds when it comes to social justice. With activities centred around the Manchester Poetry Library, open to the general public, all events in the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence programme are free, and everyone is welcome – you just need to book tickets.

The annual international campaign 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence began in 1991 and is supported by the United Nations. It gets underway on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and runs until 10 December, Human Rights Day.

The MMU 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence festival has been organised in response to the international campaign hosted by UN Women, and aims to examine how poetry can create transformational social change in partnership with the public and policymakers.

Being launched on 25 November by Dr Kim Moore, senior lecturer in creative writing and Forward Prize-winning poet, with a reading and discussion event (the author of All The Men I Never Married and Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism is also running other events, including a workshop on 30 November), the 16-day programme is being co-organised by Sarah Cleave, lecturer in publishing and creative writing, and Dr Frazer Heritage, senior lecturer in linguistics, and departmental ethics representative.

The festival is supported by AHEAD, the public engagement programme of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University, and is a trans-inclusive event and wheelchair accessible, taking place in person at the Manchester Poetry Library and Lowry Building at Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as online.

We’ve picked out a handful of events that we think might be of particular interest (in date order below), but do check out the full programme on the Man Met website.

Clare Shaw – praised by the Times Literary Supplement for their ‘fierce, memorable and visceral’ style – joins lecturer Dr Malika Booker, the first woman to win the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem twice, to share work that explores articulations of inherited trauma, gendered violence and resistance (Manchester Poetry Library, 26 November, 2-4pm).

On 5 December (Manchester Poetry Library, 6-7.30pm), there’s a reading and discussion by Manchester’s City Poet Laureate and Man Met Senior Lecturer Anjum Malik and PhD candidate Charlotte Shevchenko Knight, who just picked up the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection UK for her book Food for the Dead (Jonathan Cape), also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and which you might have heard her reading from at the most recent Poets & Players. (Charlotte Shevchenko Knight also takes part in an online panel discussion on 1 December.)

Not to be missed is a reading by Joelle Taylor (Manchester Poetry Library, 6 December, 6-7.30pm), whose Faber collection C+nto & Othered Poems won the 2022 Polari Prize and the TS Eliot Prize. It is a compelling, passionate and evocative examination of the 1980s and 1990s butch lesbian counterculture in London. Her recent debut novel, The Night Alphabet, is a relentlessly inventive investigation into human nature and violence against women.

On 9 December (Manchester Poetry Library, 2-4pm), MPL’s Roma Havers (also running an erasure workshop as part of the programme, on 27 November) is joined for a reading by Dr Nat Raha, a poet and activist-scholar who will be reading from her new collection, apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024). Her work seeks to inject the disruptive potential of collective action into the body of the poem. Her poetry has also appeared in 100 Queer (2022) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020).

To close the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence festival, and to celebrate Human Rights Day, you’re invited to join Dr Katherine Angel and Professor Helen Mort for an evening of incisive, topical readings (Lowry Building, 10 December, 7-8.30pm). Katherine Angel’s literary non-fiction is described as “always beautifully poetic and ranges widely in its engagement with issues around female desire, sexuality, consent and violence” while Helen Mort’s acclaimed poetry collections include the Forward Prize-shortlisted The Illuminated Woman, “a tender and incisive exploration of what it means to live in a woman’s body”.