Fran Lock, Tom Branfoot, Robert Selby, Alice Gretton, Nancy Charley, Matt Riches & Kat Peddie

Saturday 2 November, 2pm – 4pm (with interval)

Host: Christopher Horton

Fruitworks Coworking 1-2 Jewry Lane, Canterbury, CT1 2NP

Tickets £5 (tickets available on the door only)

Fran Lock is the author of numerous chapbooks and thirteen poetry collections, most recently Hyena! (Poetry Bus Press, 2023), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023. Fran was the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University (2022-23), researching feral subjectivity through the lens of the medieval Bestiary. Vulgar Errors/ Feral Subjects, a collection of essays based on her work at Cambridge, was published by Out-Spoken Press last year. Fran is a Commissioning Editor and Maid of All Work at the cooperative Culture Matters.

Tom Branfoot is the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral and a recipient of the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. 

Robert Selby edits the literary journal Wild Court and reviews for various publications. His debut collection, The Coming-Down Time, was published by Shoestring Press in 2020. The Kentish Rebellion, a book-length sequence, appeared from Shoestring in July 2022. He wrote a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London, on the life and work of Mick Imlah. During it, he co-edited Mick Imlah: Selected Prose (Peter Lang, 2015) and was highly commended in the Faber New Poets scheme. A pamphlet of poems appeared from Clutag Press in 2017.

Alice Gretton is an award-winning spoken word artist from Canterbury, Kent. She has performed nationally ranging from UniSlam 2018 in Leicester, winner of the UKYA award for Nottingham City Takeover 2019, headlining SlamDunk in Hastings 2018 and performing in Raise the Bar in Bath 2018. A former National Poetry Day Poet, Alice Gretton’s debut book, Fruit Salad & Rockets, joins poetry and prose with ribbons of illustration

Nancy Charley is a writer and the Archivist for the Royal Asiatic Society in London. Her latest poetry collection is Grace Notes (June 2023). This Woman was published by Conversation Paperpress with a second edition published by Eagle’s Nest Publishing. Eagle’s Nest Publishing has published several of her collections including Patricia’s Box, Dead to Fire, and Trees to Treasure, as well as the non-fiction books, Being Church and The Sea Changes. Little Blue Hut, based on a 6 week residency in a beach hut, was released by Smokestack Books in February 2017. Her second book with Smokestack Books was How Death Came into the World which was published in 2020.

Mat Riches is from Norfolk, but lives in Beckenham. He has previously worked in a plastics factory, a variety of pubs, and a book wholesaler, but currently works in market research and as ITV’s (unofficial) poet-in-residence. When he’s not doing those things, he’s either being a parent, a husband or running.  He co-runs Rogue Strands poetry evenings, and blogs at Wear The Fox Hat. A pamphlet, Collecting the Data, is out via Red Squirrel Press. Recent work has been included in Wild Court, The New Statesman, The Friday Poem, Bad Lilies, Frogmore Papers and Finished Creatures.

Kat Peddie is a poet who writes plays. Her performance work is inventive and laugh-out-loud funny, taking a satirical look at modern poetry and gender politics through a wry absurdist lens. Kat is one half of the band Kate’s Bush. She works closely with the Free Range Orchestra and co-hosts the Range Free Variety Show & Open Mic. Kat is also a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her publications include Spaces for Sappho (Oystercatcher 2016), the digital opera The Octopus (composed by Lauren Redhead, Pan y Rosas Discos 2020) and poems and photographs published in Tears in the Fence, Shearsman Magazine, Snow, Tentacular, Datableed, Golden Handcuffs Review, Litmus, Molly Bloom and Junction Box, among others