This event will begin at 7.30pm on Zoom. Please book tickets through the Eventbrite link on our Home Page ten days before the date.

Clare Shaw (they/them) has four poetry collections with Bloodaxe. Their latest collection Towards a General Theory of Love was awarded a Northern Writer’s Award, and was published in May 2022. Clare is Co-Director of the Kendal Poetry Festival and a regular tutor for Wordsworth Grasmere and the Arvon Foundation.
Clare is widely published in anthologies, most recently Faber’s 100 Queer Poems (2022). They have written and presented poetry, drama and documentaries on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, and they work in collaboration with artists and academics across genres. In 2022, Clare wrote the libretto for the opera “Daylighting” which premiered at the Royal Academy for Music. In 2019, they were a judge for the final Ted Hughes Award which celebrated new poetic work beyond the conventional realms of poetry.
With a background in mental health and education, Clare is a keen advocate for writing as a tool of social and personal change. They work tirelessly to engage new audiences with poetry, and as Project Lead for the Royal Literary Fund, were responsible for setting up writing projects in workplaces across the UK. Clare was the resident poet for Lancashire Wildlife Trust in 2021 and they continue to use poetry to engage communities with wildlife and ecology. In collaboration with the novelist Winnie M Li, Clare was the recipient of a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award in 2019, creating workshops and a free online resource for survivors of trauma: available via this link: http://clearlines.org.uk/our-free-creative-writing-guide-for-survivors-available-here/

Hannah Linden is from a Northern working class background but she has been based in Devon, for many years. She lives in ramshackle social housing with her two (adult and adult-cusp). She was part of Jo Bell’s 52 group and worked as a steward for Poetry Swindon/The Big Poetry Weekend for several years. She is published widely eg in Acumen, Lighthouse, Magma, New Welsh Review, Shearsman, Stand, Tears in the Fence, Under the Radar. With Gram Joel Davies she won the Cheltenham Festival Compound Poetry Competition in 2015 and was Highly Commended in the Prole Poet Laureate Prize in the same year. Her most recent awards are 1^st prize in the Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition 2021 and Highly Commended in the Poetry Wales Award 2021. Her debut pamphlet, The Beautiful Open Sky is published by V. Press and she is working towards her first full collection. Twitter: @hannahl1n