Please join us on Saturday 28 September 2024, 2.30-4.00 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for a wonderful line-up of poets and musicians.

You will find all the information you need regarding visiting the IABF on their website here. The event is free and everyone is welcome (no need to book tickets). Performers often bring along books and CDs to sell, please note we are only able to accept cash payments.

You can read about the poets and musicians below:

Sarah Howe

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A new collection is forthcoming in 2025. Previous honours include a Hawthornden Fellowship and the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry, as well as fellowships from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. 

Lorcán Black

Lorcán Black is an Irish writer. His poetry has been published in The Tomahawk Review, Stirring, The Rush, Grim&Gilded, New Writing Scotland, The Los Angeles Review, Assaracus & The Stinging Fly, amongst numerous others. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist as a radio newsreader, a print journalist and now works in higher education.

He is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee and has been longlisted for the Black Spring Press Prize and the Two Sylvias Prize, and shortlisted for The Paris Literary Prize.

His first collection, Rituals, was published by April Gloaming Publishing in 2019. Strange Husbandry is his second poetry collection – a Forward Prize nominee and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn –  was published by Seren Books in 2024. He lives in London.

Tom Branfoot

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This is Not an Epiphany (Smith/Doorstop and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.

Odd Schlocks

Odd Schlocks is a band where klezmer meets jazz, led by clarinettist and saxophonist Daniel Mawson. 

The group draws its inspiration from the cultural melting pot of the early twentieth century ‘New World’. Yiddish dance melodies of Eastern Europe meet traditional jazz, swing, and the tunes of Tin Pan Alley, with traditional arrangements and modern fusion thrown in for good measure: perhaps it is a ‘Freylekh in Schving’, or a ‘Broadway Bulgar’, or Yiddish Theatre Jazz Standard. With a little bit from here and a little bit from there, one person’s schlock is another person’s treasure.

Schlock • YIDDISH / N. AMERICAN • /ʃlɒk/ “cheap or inferior goods; trash”