our final event of 2022 sees us team up with Bad Betty Press on the Leeds leg of their UK! we’ll be returning to Hyde Park Book Club on Thursday 24 November with an outstanding line-up of poets for your hearts and minds.

tickets cost £6 (£4 concessions) and are available here.

Maria Ferguson

Maria Ferguson is a writer, performer, and multi-award-winning theatre-maker from Romford. She has been a resident artist for Roundhouse and Battersea Arts Centre and commissioned by the Royal Academy of Art, Stylist, and BBC Radio 1.

Her debut solo show ‘Fat Girls Don’t Dance’ won the Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Her second show ‘Essex Girl’ was shortlisted for Soho Theatre’s Tony Craze Award and won Show of the Week at VAULT 2019.

Her debut poetry collection ‘Alright, Girl?’ was published by Burning Eye Books in 2020. Her poem ‘My Letters’, featured in the collection, was Highly Commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2021. She’s recently been published in Magma, Myslexia, Butcher’s Dog, and more.

Tanatsei Gambura

Tanatsei Gambura is a poet, new-genres artist, and cultural practitioner considering the dichotomy of forgetting and remembering as a productive space in which violence and trauma can be understood. In spring 2021, her pamphlet ‘Things I Have Forgotten Before’ was published by Bad Betty Press and was selected by the Poetry Book Society as the autumn choice of the year. It was listed by Poetry School as one of 2021’s Books of the Year, with one of its poems selected by Imtiaz Dharker for Poetry Archive’s Wordview competition.

In 2020, Tanatsei was announced as the runner-up to the inaugural Amsterdam Open Book Prize presented by Versal Journal (Amsterdam) and was longlisted by the Rebecca Swift Foundation for the Women Poets’ Prize. Tanatsei’s poems have appeared in Poetry London, Prufrock Magazine, and New Coin Poetry Journal, among others. She is an alumnus of the British Council residency ‘These Images are Stories’ and is an inaugural fellow of the Obsidian Foundation.

Molly Naylor

Molly Naylor is an award-winning writer and performer. Her stories and plays have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and she has performed at festivals and events all over the world. She has featured on radio shows and podcasts including ‘A Good Read’ and ‘The Guilty Feminist’. Her third poetry collection ‘Whatever You’ve Got’ is published by Bad Betty Press.

She is the co-creator and writer of Sky One comedy ‘After Hours’. She wrote and performed the acclaimed solo spoken-word shows ‘Stop Trying To Be Fantastic’, ‘Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You’ and ‘My Robot Heart’.

Kirsten Luckins

Kirsten Luckins is a Teesside poet and performer whose third collection, ‘Passerine’ (Bad Betty) was longlisted for the 2021 Laurel Prize for Eco-Poetry. She is the artistic director of the Tees Women Poets collective, and project manager for the Rebecca Swift Foundation where she manages the #WomenPoetsNetwork and the biennial #WomenPoetsPrize.