Ian Harker, Joe Williams and guests at The Leeds Library

Join Leeds-based writer Ian Harker as he launches his pamphlet, Gain Access, co-winner of the 2025 Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition, judged by Kim Moore.

The event (pay what you can) will be introduced by poet Joe Williams – who runs the marvellous Chemistry, which you absolutely must check out if you are Leeds bound (the next, on 24 September, features fabulous Fens poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough and Jamie Thrasivoulou). There will also be a couple of special guest readers, whose identities will be revealed nearer the time, and it takes place at The Leeds Library (the one on Commercial Street, not the big public library, Joe helpfully points out), where apparently there’s a new event space – and where Ian works.

Ian Harker is a poet and editor, a director of Leeds Lit Fest and communications officer at The Leeds Library. His pamphlet A – Z of Superstitions was published by Yaffle Press in 2023, along with a debut pamphlet and collection from Templar Poetry. An Honorary Fellow of Leeds Trinity University, Ian Harker was shortlisted for the inaugural Tempest Prize from New Writing North, judged by Andrew McMillan and Patience Agbabi, and was one of Ilkley Literature Festival & Word Up North’s 2024 New Northern Poets.

Gain Access is a vivid, unflinching journey through the frontlines of social housing. From surreal skips full of carrots to the silence of abandoned flats, the collection illuminates the lives lived behind closed doors. Bringing together poems about resilience and humanity, it’s about the effects of fifteen years of cuts to vital services, and the ways a community in the north of England comes together to support each other. With humour, compassion and a sharp sense of place, these pieces capture the absurd, the bureaucratic, and the deeply human. This is housing as you’ve never read it before: haunted by memory, bursting with resilience, and always listening out for longtails.

Kim Moore said of Gain Access: “I’ve always loved poems about work, but I’ve never read anything quite like this. Written from the viewpoint of a social housing officer, we get an insight into the emotional toll it takes to do a job where you want to help people but instead become part of an under-resourced system that is often casually cruel and fails the people it should be protecting. These poems are full of humour, keen observation and insight about society and our roles within it.”

And if you’re in the Lakes on 4 October, join The Poetry Business and competition judge Kim Moore at Wordsworth Grasmere (2pm) to celebrate the winners of the 2025 International Book & Pamphlet Competition – Ian Harker and Annina Zheng-Hardy will be reading poems from their prize-winning pamphlets alongside the competition runners-up Sally Baker and Ilse Pedler. Meanwhile on 18 October (3.30pm), there’s a special event for Ilkley Literature Festival celebrating The North, the UK’s inspirational poetry magazine produced by The Poetry Business for 40 years. Ian Harker will be reading alongside the journal’s editors Ann and Peter Sansom, who will be introducing a new anthology featuring poems published in The North by the likes of Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Ian McMillan, Kim Moore and Helen Mort.