Join us from 7pm for an evening of poetry readings with two of the most exciting voices on the British poetry scene, Imtiaz Dharker (Luck is the Hook, 2018) and Rachael Allen (God Complex, 2024)

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About the Poets:

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker. She was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014.She received the Cholmondeley Award and an Honorary Doctorate from SOAS, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2020 she became the Chancellor of Newcastle University. Her collections include Purdah (Oxford University Press), Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table (all published by Penguin India and Bloodaxe Books UK), Leaving Fingerprints, Over the Moon, Luck is the Hookand her latest, Shadow Reader (May 2024, Bloodaxe Books UK).

'Whether she writes of exile, childhood, politics or grief, her clear-eyed attention brings each subject dazzlingly into focus. She makes it look easy, this clarity and economy, but it is her deft phrasing, wit and grace that create this immediacy.

If there were to be a World Laureate, then for me the role could only be filled by Imtiaz Dharker.' - Carol Ann Duffy

Rachael Allen is the author of the poetry collection God Complex. Her first collection of poems, Kingdomland, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She is the co-author of a number of collaborative artists' books, including Nights of Poor Sleep with Marie Jacotey, and Almost One. Say Again! with JocJonJosch. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award and New Writing North's Andrew Waterhouse award, and was a Burgess Fellow at The University of Manchester. She is the poetry editor for Granta magazine and Granta Books, and writes on poetry and visual art for TANK magazine, Art Review, Art Agenda, and others.

God Complex is a sweeping and corrosive epic, a narrative poem that tells the story of the breakup of a toxic relationship in the face of the similarly toxic catastrophe of global degradation and disaster.