Poets & Players at Burgess Foundation

Manchester regular Poets & Players is a must-diarise for lovers of words as well as music, presenting performers both established and emerging, with the latest readers Jacqueline Saphra, Nick Laird and Naush Sabah. The players part this month comes courtesy cellist Li Lu.

Apt then, that Jacqueline Saphra’s latest book, which came out in July with Nine Arches Press, is called Velvel’s Violin. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation, this is her fifth collection; it follows One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (2021), Dad, Remember You are Dead (2019), All My Mad Mothers (2017), shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye 2011), which was nominated for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. She has also written five chapbooks, including, from The Emma Press, If I Lay on my Back I Saw Nothing but Naked Women (illustrated by Mark Andrew Webber and set to music by Benjamin Tassie), which won the Saboteur Award for Best Collaborative Work. She is the author of ten stage plays; her newest, The Noises, was nominated for a Standing Ovation Award. Jacqueline is a keen performer and collaborator, working with composers, musicians, visual artists and other poets. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches and mentors for The Poetry School and The Arvon Foundation.

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. His collection Feel Free (2018) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize and the Derek Walcott Award. ‘Up Late’, the title poem from his latest collection Up Late – published by Faber & Faber in June – won the Forward Prize for Best Poem last year. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queens’ University, Belfast.

Naush Sabah is a writer, editor, critic and educator based in the West Midlands, and editor and publishing director of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, which she co-founded in 2019. Naush also co-founded Pallina Press where she is editor-at-large and she currently also serves as a trustee at Poetry London. Her writing has appeared in The Poetry Review, the TLS, PN Review, The Dark Horse, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. A limited-edition double micro-pamphlet box set Heredity/ASTYNOME was published by Broken Sleep Books imprint Legitimate Snack in June 2020. Her debut pamphlet Litanies was published by Guillemot Press in November 2021 and shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award in 2022. She was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s 2021 Sky Arts Writers Award and she is a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Birmingham City University.

Yvonne Reddick, one of the readers at the October event, will be running a creative writing workshop prior to the main event; check the P&P website for details. Her first collection, Burning Season, came out with Bloodaxe in May 2023 and won the Laurel Prize for Best UK First Collection of Ecopoetry. Its title poem was a prizewinner in the Gingko Prize for Ecopoetry 2023. Her other publications include Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet and Anthropocene Poetry.