Readings

Poets from the floor welcome.

October's exhibition will be covers from Smokestack Books, a publishing house whose remit was to keep open a space for what is left of the radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack championed unfashionable, socialist and left-field poets working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority.

Guest reader Andy Croft was born in Cheshire. He has worked in university adult education and community writing projects, in over 400 schools and a dozen prisons. He ran the Writearound Community Writing Festival in Cleveland (1989-2000), the T-junction International Poetry Festival in Middlesbrough (2014-18) and the Ripon Poetry Festival (2017-24). He wrote a monthly poetry column in the Morning Star from 2004-22, and for many years edited the ‘poem of the week’ feature in the paper. He helped run Teesside community-publishers Mudfog Books from 1993 to 2003, and edited Smokestack Books from 1004-2024. Writing Residencies include the Hartlepool Headland, the Great North Run, the Southwell Poetry Festival and the Combe Down Stone Mines Project.

Andy Croft’s books include Red Letter Days, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler, After the Party, Forty-six Quid and a Bag of Dirty Washing, Bare Freedom, The Years of Anger and The Privatisation of Poetry.

His books of poetry include Great North, Comrade Laughter, Ghost Writer, Sticky, Three Men on the Metro, Nineteen Forty-eight, Letters to Randall Swingler and The Sailors of Ulm. Edited collections include Red Sky at Night (with Adrian Mitchell), Not Just a Game (with Sue Dymoke), A Modern Don Juan (with Nigel Thompson), Smokestack Lightning and Release the Sausages: Poems for Keir Starmer.

‘laugh-out-loud funny’ (Guardian)

‘dreadfully old-fashioned’ (Tribune)

‘the Alexander Pope of the North’ (John Hartley-Williams)

‘puerile’ (TLS)

‘Swiftian vigour’ (Tears in the Fence)

Poet and performance artist Patrizia Longhitano hosts Venn Diagrams. She pairs poets whose work has no apparent connection and the audience discovers points of overlap.

Suyin Du Bois is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage, living in London. Her poems have been published in publications including Propel, Iamb, Stanzas, and Fourteen Publishing’s Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets. When not obsessing over word choice, she spends her time building a profit-with-purpose start-up that seeks to ensure 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food for NHS hospital staff.

Raised by a couture dress designer, costume and identity have always been central to William Wyld’s writing. Their work explores themes of close family, parenthood, love and sex by inhabiting different voices, and is also rooted in the landscape and a love of animals and nature, relating to their practice as a painter. They have been published in Queer Life Queer Love II, the Lighthouse journal, the Live Canon sonnet anthology been sHighly commended in the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. They are a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective cohort of 2023 /24.

Poets from the floor welcome

Poet and performance artist Patrizia Longhitano hosts Venn Diagrams. She usually pairs poets whose work has no apparent connection and the audience discovers points of overlap. Experimental poetry films are also made and shown.

Poetry Karaoke hosted by Sara Mostafa. An opportunity for sharing poetry that you love. The concept is simple: choose a poem (not yours, someone else’s); perform it to the crowd and tell us why you love it!

Poet and performance artist Patrizia Longhitano hosts Venn Diagrams. She pairs poets whose work has no apparent connection and the audience discovers points of overlap. 

Poets from the floor welcome.

We’lll have Gayathiri Kamalakanthan (@unembarrassable) and Nasim Luczaj (@nasimluczaj) coming to visit us bringing piping hot books with them: Bad Queer (@faberbooks)and Ultraviolet with Landing Marks (@oblique_house).
Don’t forget to bring a poem for the OPEN MIC and we’ll project the new VD Cento poetry video made with your performed lines from the previous event.

Gayathiri Kamalakanthan is a Tamil writer. They’re interested in how language shapes belonging and how we might use it to build freer futures. Gayathiri won the Poetry Archive Now Prize 2025 and the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Their play ‘Period Parrrty’ is a trans Tamil rom-com and opened at Soho Theatre in 2025. Their debut novel-in-verse, ‘Bad Queer’, is out with Faber. gayathiri.co.uk, IG: @unembarrassable

Nasim Luczaj is a poet, translator, and co-editor of the environmental poetry magazine Wet Grain. She is the author of Hind Mouth (Earthbound Press) and Ultraviolet with Landing Marks (Oblique House). Her debut collection, Tang, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2027.

"Much the most reviled figure amongst the establishment Gregory has carved out a career in permanent opposition. He's the Dennis Skinner or the Tony Benn of the playwriting fraternity" Domonic Dromgoole, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting

"The bad boy of  British theatre" (The Independent)

Gregory Motton (born September 1961) is a British playwright, author, and film director. First known for the originality of his formally demanding, largely a-political theatre plays, performed first at the Royal Court in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the Odeon and Comedie Francaise in Paris, and then for state of the nation political satires in the 1990s and later for his polemics about working class politics, A Working Class Alternative To Labour  (2013) and Helping Themselves – The Left Wing Middle Classes In Theatre And The Arts (2008).

He has also written 40 monologues between 2024-2025

His work is rarely  performed, in Britain.

He speaks fluent Swedish and is one of the chief translators of Strindberg's plays, known for his strict advocacy of translations rather than versions.