Bloodaxe poets at Verve Poetry Festival 2025
This year’s Verve Poetry Festival takes place in Birmingham and online 13 - 16 February and features several Bloodaxe authors. Full festival passes, day passes and online passes are available. The full programme can be found online here. All in-person event take place at the Birmingham Hippodrome unless otherwise stated.
Dzifa Benson, whose debut collection Monster was published in October, will be leading a workshop titled 'Turning Movement into Poetry', channeling the work of choreographer and dance theorist Rudolf Laban. This in-person workshop is at 4pm on Friday 14 February. Tickets are available here. Dzifa will also be reading at the festival at the Friday headline event later that day, at 8.30pm, alongside Anthony Joseph and Richard Scott, hosted by Helen Bowell. Online and in-person tickets for this event are available here.
On Sunday 16 February at 2.30pm, Aoife Lyall will be leading a workshop on Soundscape in Poetry, which can be booked here. Aoife's new collection The Day Before was published in February 2024. The Day Before is Aoife Lyall’s second collection, following her widely praised debut, Mother, Nature, which was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards in 2021.
Hannah Lowe will be hosting a reading by the winners and commended poets in the Verve poetry competition, of which she was this year's judge. This free event takes place on Sunday 16 February at 11am and is also being livestreamed. In-person and digital tickets can be booked here. Hannah Lowe's third full collection, The Kids was the Poetry Book Society Choice for Autumn 2021. It won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
The Verve Closing Gala event at 4.30pm on Sunday 16 February will include a reading by Courtney Conrad, whose debut pamphlet I Am Evidence (Bloodaxe Books, September 2023) was the winner of the 2022 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition, judged by Imtiaz Dharker, and includes some work which won her an Eric Gregory Award in 2022. The pamphlet also went on to win the 2023 Michael Marks Poetry Award. Courtney will be joined at the Closing Gala by Jamie Thrasivoulou, plus open mic readers. This event is in person and live-streamed, and tickets are available here.
[10 December 2024]
