Date: Saturday 18th April 2026

Venue: Arnolfini (Community Workshop)

Time: 12:30 - 14:30

Tickets: £8 (£10 solidarity, £6 concessions)

✅ All Lyra Fest venues are wheelchair accessible. Access Information Pack available at www.lyrafest.com.

Creating Queer & Othered Worlds: with Joelle Taylor

Writing Workshop

Join acclaimed poet Joelle Taylor for an exclusive writing workshop in Bristol exploring critical fabulation through a queer lens. Joelle's latest collection, Maryville, returns to the eponymous underground lesbian bar that readers first visited in Joelle's TS Eliot Prize-winning collection C+nto & Othered Poems. Experimenting with approaches that Joelle used in these collections, this workshop will look at how to create fictional universes in poetry, and how to explore queer identity as we build worlds. This workshop is open to writers who identify as LGBTQI+.

Joelle Taylor

Joelle Taylor is a queer, working-class author of six plays, a novel, and four collections of poetry. Her 2021 collection, C+NTO & Othered Poems, won the TS Eliot Prize, the Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors, and is currently being adapted for the theatre. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her latest collection Maryville, released in November 2025, charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history and was described as ‘urgent and memorable’ by The Guardian. Joelle is the host and co-curator of Out-Spoken, the UK’s premier poetry and music club, currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She has featured regularly on BBC radio and television, presenting the documentaries Butch, and A Young Girl's Guide to Horror.

Part of Lyra – Bristol Poetry Festival 2026

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