European Poetry Festival European Camarade at Open Eye Gallery Liverpool

The Camarade format asks pairs of poets, many of whom have never met before, to produce new collaborative works especially for the reading, with no criteria other than a seven-minute time limit. The blurb states: ‘This non-determinate curatorial model creates innate innovation and explorations of the possibilities around live poetry and performance. Moreover, it creates friendships and communities. These events are rapid fire and energised but fundamentally serious and complex in the work they often produce.’

This special now annual one-off at the Open Eye Gallery on Liverpool’s waterfront sees eight pairs of poets present their reading, including EPF curator, London-based writer, poet and performer SJ Fowler, reprising his long-time collaboration with zimZalla press’s Tom Jenks, heading over from Manchester.

Creative Tourist‘s very own Literature Editor Sarah-Clare Conlon  is teamed up with Carolyn Hashimoto, a writer, editor and mentor based in Scotland. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Chips are Down Here in Lockdown (OrangeApple Press, 2021) and COW (Osmosis Press, 2022), and her work has appeared in publications including Gutter, 3:AM Magazine,  Tentacular, perverse, BlueHouse Journal and Gilded Dirt. Hashimoto is also the founder and editor of online journal Skirting Around, which explores the politics of women’s clothing through creative writing and visual art.

Conlon’s collaborator from last time round, Julia Rose Lewis, is partnered with Alec Newman, founder of avant-garde and experimental poetry press Knives, Forks and Spoons Press (KFS). As a poet, Newman has authored several works, including Earthworks (2009), illustrated by Stacey Dunkinson, and Saints & Sinners (2011). Julia Rose Lewis is a writer and teacher, and the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Misuse (KFS, 2024).  She co-authored the poetry collections Strays with James Miller, The Velvet Protocol with Nathan Hyland Walker and Postcards from Mental States with Paul Hawkins.

From the year before, Liverpool-based Professor Emeritus at Edge Hill and poet extraordinaire Robert Sheppard is back, this time with Thomas Ballhausen, a writer, philosopher and media scholar born in Vienna. His most recent publications, in which he increasingly explores the connections between prose and poetry, include Transient. Lyric Essay (Edition Melos, 2020) and Unter elektrischen Monden (Edition Keiper, 2023).

Teaming with Camarade regular David Spittle, Lenni Sanders is on the bill for the second year, as is Sarah Dawson, who has been working with Andrew Taylor for their piece – and as Dawson is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, studying the practice of failure in contemporary experimental poetry performance, expect the unexpected. Other regulars Michael Sutton and Stephen Sunderland appear alongside Lena Chilari and Endre Ruset, respectively.

Spoken word performer Chilari was born in the Republic of Moldova and graduated from the Faculty of Letters at UBB Cluj. Winner of the “King of the Morning” award of the Alexandru Mușina Debut Competition, her first collection O Cană de Noviciok la bâtrenețe came out in 2020 and she published her second volume of poetry, Ludmila răstoarnă munții (Max Blecher Publishing House) last year.

Sunderland’s film-novel The Cinema Beneath the Lake is forthcoming Orbis Tertius (watch this space for launch details), and his visual poetry collections include Eye Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022), Oneiroscope (Kingston University Press, 2023), Refrains (Steel Incisors, 2023) and Unforgettable Singing Animal (out in 2026 with Ice Floe Press). His work appears in numerous anthologies Seen as Read and in journals including M58, 3:AM, Mercurius, Overground Underground, Osmosis and Litter.