(IMAGE CREDIT: Seth Guy)

TOBY BROOKS:
Two Windows and A Door (working title) is a conversation between a poet and an artist trying to find a solution to the world of work. It’s a bit weird and no, they don’t find it.
The poet, Toby Brooks, will be reading extracts from his side of the conversation. Poems range from odd to absurd with a few clearer images thrown in along the way.
He will explore working in an office and not wanting to work in an office. He will talk about love, heartbreak and the weather.
Marina de Laitre, the artist, is based in Hong Kong and so is unable to attend. You’ll get the gist from the poems though hopefully.
The book will be published early next year so keep your ears peeled for it.

NED VESSEY:
Ned Vessey is a writer from Dorset, although currently based in Bristol. As a journalist, his work has appeared in The Guardian and Wisden's Nightwatchman Quarterly. His fiction and poetry mainly focuses on the relationship between landscapes and people, and how each shapes the other. Rural England, the natural world and the everyday highs and lows of human life also play important parts in his work. He is currently working on a collection of short stories, and trying to be a better poet.

LEILA EL MANFAA:
Leila El Manfaa is a traveling poet, painter, prose author, and sometimes-hermit from Far Away. They approach their work and their world similarly- softly detached from reality and with an insistence on romance and space. They reckon with the darknesses of the human experience through this lens of tenderness, to hold a space of dreamlike drama where the magnitude of feeling can be honored. Leila has no published works as of yet, and finds the most joy in sharing their work with whomever is present at the time.

SIMON MORETON:
Simon Moreton is an artist working across prose, poetry, collage, comics, and drawing. He is interested in how the things that happen to us, the histories of the places we live in, and how we remember things, shape who we are. His first pamphlet of poems, Gardening Beneath a Falling Piano, was published by Bored Wolves in 2024. Other work includes his regular zine series Minor Leagues, and the books Now is the Time to Know Everything (2023 self-published), WHERE? (2021 Little Toller), and Plans We Made (2015 Uncivilised Books).

Entry requirements: no age restrictions — Read more — Read less