Denise Riley and Deryn Rees-Jones Reading and In Conversation Event, 27th June 2026 — a conversation between Jenni Hampshire and Rose Schierig (abridged version, full audio available).

Linda Anderson and John Challis book launch review, 17th June 2026 — a conversation between Jenni Hampshire and Rose Schierig (abridged version, full audio available).

Schierig traces how Martina Evans's Drunken Driving, drawn from Evans's time as a radiographer in Pentonville Prison in the 1990s, uses its striking formal structure of prison regulations and Dracula epigraphs to mirror the speaker's claustrophobic struggle for control in both her professional and personal life.

Hampshire explores Riley's central argument that poetry has its own emergent voice, independent of the poet's conscious control or persona — that the best writing happens when the author loosens their grip and allows language to move through them rather than directing it.

Bowers highlights Astley’s edited anthology Land of Three Rivers as a rich celebration of North-East England’s poetic heritage, bringing together centuries of regional voices to illuminate themes of identity, landscape, industry, and belonging.

Hampshire explores how Deyn's Folkish weaves Northern mythology and landscape into a meditation on belonging and strangeness, where the Lambton Worm's loneliness and the region's folklore illuminate the lives of those shaped by, and still searching for, their place in the North.

McGarry explores how Howe’s Foretokens traces the entanglement of inherited trauma and identity, where family history folds across generations until past and present become impossible to separate.

Schierig captures how Anderson’s Against Falling moves through fragments, whispers, and shadows, where the poems haunt the spaces between memory and selfhood.

Hampshire considers how Rees-Jones’ Hôtel Amour moves through grief, love and dislocation in fragmented chronologies where memories collapse into the present.

Choudhary highlights how The Intentions of Thunder binds private catastrophe to collective history, with Smith using unrelenting language to expose the afterlives of racial violence, survival, and love.

Hampshire shows how The Green Parcel moves carefully between excavation and tenderness, with Challis finding quiet emotional force in the hidden worlds beneath language, memory, and fatherhood.

Choudhary explores Shuttle’s collection which excavates childhood through four braided sequences, where playful sonic invention sits alongside real ache and loss. Equal parts mischief and poignancy, it's a collection that treats childhood as, in Choudary’s words, "the first country of poetry."