Please join us on Saturday 26 April 2025, 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:

Katharine Towers

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak (2021) which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. A pamphlet The Violin Forest was published by HappenStance in 2019 and in 2023 The Maker’s Press published let him bring a shrubbe, a pamphlet exploring the life and music of English composer Gerald Finzi.

Sascha Akhtar

Sascha Akhtar is a CW lecturer at the University of Greenwich. She performs internationally, some highlights include the Medway Festival of Literature, Emirates Festival of Literature and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. Latest writings appear in Fugitives & Futurists, Shuddhasar Free Voice, Deleuzine, Rivista journal Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press), Of Myths and Mothers anthology 2022, and Lucy Writers Platform. Latest books are ∑Void Song∩ ≠ Futurepast Sequence Of,… Intergraphia Press, The Grimoire of Grimalkin (New Edition) and a book of translations from Urdu with Oxford University Press. Akhtar has received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English awarded by the Association for Asian Studies.

Victoria Gatehouse

Victoria Gatehouse is a Zoologist, award-winning poet and children’s writer. She grew up in Leeds and is now based in West Yorkshire. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC radio and widely published in magazines including The Rialto, Mslexia, Magma, The North, Anthropocene and Butcher’s Dog. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (Smith | Doorstop) was selected as a ‘Laureate’s Choice’ by Carol Ann Duffy, and she is a Pushcart nominee. Victoria is a three-times winner of The Poetry News Members’ Competition, and was highly commended for the Gingko Prize, 2023. Her first poetry collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is published by Indigo Dreams.

Chris Davies & Rachael Gladwin

Chris Davies is a Musician, Composer, Performer,  Buddhist, Hairdresser and Oudistwith over thirty years experience working in the Arts, mainly with visual theatre and dance. His current projects are composing music and performing in a new adaptation of the 12th century Sufi poem ‘The Conference of Birds’ by Farid ud-Din Attar; he continues to perform live accompaniment for the first full length animated film ever made ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, with a play called ‘Spring Reign’ about the situation in Aleppo, Syria; he is saxophonist/raver with Mr Wilson’s Second Liners who play early 90’s dance classics in the style of a New Orleans Brass Band, a few haircuts, transforming the mind through Buddhist study and practice, and sound technician for Poets and Players. For more information please look here ~ http://www.musichris.co.uk

Rachael Gladwin is a musician, composer, actor and puppeteer. She specialises in creating beautiful musical scores that integrate with
theatre pieces and visual stories, using harp, vocals and percussion as well as other instruments and electronic effects.