The Forwards are the UK and Ireland’s foremost poetry prizes, celebrating the very best of contemporary poetry published in the British Isles. A week ahead of the much-anticipated announcement of this year’s winners, we hear from poets on the 2021 shortlist.
Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet and poetry educator who combines the personal and the political to bring the injustices of contemporary British society into sharp relief. Alycia Pirmohamed’s poetry interweaves history, both individual and collective memory, a powerfully intersectional feminism, and a deep connection to land and the natural world.
This event brings together some of the sizzling talents published by Stewed Rhubarb in recent years. In a quick-fire hour of poetry, you can expect appearances from Colin Bramwell, Ellen Renton, Tracey S. Rosenberg, Bibi June, Henry Bell and Ross McCleary. Together, we will abolish prisons, take our Highland Citizenship tests, and spend every minute of the hour endorsing poetry in its purest Stewed Rhubarb form.
Push the Boat Out has the honour of celebrating the centenary of the late and great George Mackay Brown. GMB was a giant of Scottish letters yet had a distinctly outsider sensibility. His musicality, his blending of fable and realism, and his placement of Orkney at the centre of his world have made an indelible and lasting impact on writers and artists of many stripes since.
Malika’s Poetry Kitchen is a writers’ collective founded in Brixton by Malika Booker and Roger Robinson in 2001. One such impact is in supporting writers to break their own taboos, to challenge themselves much more deeply – be that in the subjects they address, the language they use or the modes of expression they experiment with. Come and have your soul warmed and your boundaries healthily expanded in this unique opportunity.
Calum Rodger is a poet working in performance, print, and digital media. Armed with a PhD in Scottish literature, he has reimagined 20th century poems as video games, and created crowdsourced poetry for the Edwin Morgan Centenary Program at the Hunterian. Sam Riviere’s poetry is fearless and satirical, and has been described as a kind of ‘anti-poetry’ in its rejection of so many of the conventions and hallows of the contemporary poetry ‘scene’.
How is poetry used in the service of politics? Contrarily, how does poetry as an art form allow us to challenge orthodoxies, smash patriarchies, upturn conventions of language and gender, and expose racism? Must all writing in this vein be bombastic, or can slow-burning, quiet resistance be just as effective?
The planet is on fire and in flood, as ever more alarming reports detail the impacts of climate change and species extinction, soil erosion and air pollution. How on earth should we respond to this ever-expanding checklist of loss? In their own inimitable ways, three astonishing poets shape their work as exercises in environmental attention.
We’re told at the start of this movie that most Burmese can write poetry or can recite a poem by heart. Poetry in Burma is an art for the common people. But what if poetry comes into collision with a repressive military regime? Maung Aung Pwint is Burma/Myanmar’s most famous living dissident poet who has been jailed many times by the regime.
Game Six is a work by Tom Sharp and Jim Sutherland about post-truth politics, language, illusion and grace. It follows the forty-one moves made by US chess player Bobby Fischer in game six of the 1972 Reykjavik World Chess Championship against Boris Spassky from the USSR. It appears as a book, a happening in Camden, a website and a showing at Push The Boat Out.
Tighten your VR goggles, stabilize your dimensional tracker and prepare for a poetic voyage through Virtual and Other Realities. With poetry readings from Stephen Sexton, Rachel Plummer, Elspeth Wilson and Jeda Pearl. Hosted by Russell Jones, deputy and poetry editor of sci-fi magazine, Shoreline of Infinity.
Fancy a slot in the next Push the Boat Out? Or maybe you’ve been inspired or disgusted by the festival and have something powerful to say… Round off the end of your festival weekend with a very special Push the Boat Out Open Mic, hosted by our Comms Manager and Poet Laureate from Treaty Six territory in Canada, Julia Sorensen, and the wonderful poet and Open Mic queen Catherine Wilson.
UK hip hop has traditionally revolved around London, but there has been an undeniable recent boom in hip hop creativity and innovation across all the nations, especially Scotland. Some of the most exciting new projects are coming from women in the genre, who are rarely centred in the hip hop narrative.
A selection of short films inspired by poetry, including: What’s Wrong With Raymond. Ashes To Fire, 50 Ways To Wank, and Image Of Here and Now.
Jodorowsky’s surreal semi-autobiographical movie is a shape-shifting fantasy, an inventive and often hilarious mystical journey through madness, savage social commentary, as profound as anything the director, now in his 80s, has ever created.
How might we use poems – those we love and those we write – to make charms and amulets to guide and protect us? Join poet Liz Berry to read, write and use craft (of all kinds!) to create your own poetic charms. Writers of all stages are welcome at this playful, nurturing workshop.
Extremely Pedestrian Chorales presents the commonplace experience and movement language of the pedestrian as an act of beauty, meaning and gentle comedy. Based on the sublime harmonies of JS Bach’s famous Chorales, it pitches them into our present day lives with just a dash of punk-ish irreverence.
All Work Together is Summerhall’s new series of Songwriters circles, highlighting some of the best of Scottish music’s established and up and coming songwriting talents. The second All Work Together event features Withered Hand and Carla J. Easton & a special guest TBA.
Writer & director Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead celebrates its 40th anniversary this year! Five Michigan State University students vacation at an isolated cabin in rural Tennessee, quickly descending into a horrifying night of gore and scares as they unwittingly awake a demonic entity.
After viewing a strangely familiar ‘video nasty’ film, Enid sets out to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, embarking on a quest that dissolves the line between fiction and reality. A psychological horror steeped in ‘80s aesthetics, Censor is an atmospheric and suspenseful love letter to horror classics.
Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. She tries as best she can to keep it together – but then nightmares come. Disturbing visions of a presence in the house calling to her, beckoning her with a ghostly allure.
Everyone in Justine’s family is a vet. And a vegetarian. At 16, she’s a brilliant and promising student. When she starts at veterinary school, she enters a decadent, merciless and dangerously seductive world. During the first week of hazing rituals, desperate to fit in whatever the cost, she strays from her family’s principles when she eats raw meat for the first time.
An earthquake hits Paris and almost immediately unleashes a thick toxic gas that kills everyone who breathes it in. An estranged couple manage to get above the gas (it tops off at about three stories high), but in doing so leave behind their daughter who has an illness that keeps her locked in a filtered containment unit.
Take a documentary musical journey in search of the soul of Afro-Cuban music. From the communist friendships of the Cold War to today, from Havana to Bamako, we follow in the footsteps of ten young Malian musicians in musical training in Cuba, who became a founding group of world music: the legendary Maravillas of Mali. Fifty years later, this forgotten group is resurrected thanks to Maestro Boncana Maïga, its historical conductor.
