A event held at St George's Bristol on Saturday 18th April. The event starts at 17:30.
Date: Saturday 18th April 2026
Venue: St. George’s Bristol (Glass Studio)
Time: 17:30 - 18:30
Tickets: £5 / £3 / FREE
✅ BSL Interpreted
✅ Captioned
✅ Live Streamed (book a ‘Live Stream Ticket’ at checkout)
✅ All Lyra Fest venues are wheelchair accessible. Access Information Pack available at www.lyrafest.com.
Shaping the Wave: Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poetics
Presented in association with Bloodaxe Books
Featuring in-person performances from Cat Chong, Gwyneth Lewis & Nat Raha, with pre-recorded video performances by Kwame Dawes, Aaron Kent, Meg Day and Khando Langri.
A celebration of the new ground-breaking Bloodaxe Books anthology, Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets. Join our special guests as they share their work and discuss this timely anthology with editor Rachael Boast. Versus Versus is supported by the Royal Society of Literature through their 2022 Literature Matters Award.
Artist Bios:
Rachael Boast
Rachael Boast is a British poet, editor and disability advocate, navigating Ichthyosis and related conditions. She has published four poetry collections with Picador, Sidereal (2011), Pilgrim’s Flower (2013), Void Studies (2016) and Hotel Raphael (2021). Her books have won the Forward First Collection Prize and The Seamus Heaney Prize, and have been shortlisted for the Griffin and T.S. Eliot Prizes. Her poems have been anthologised in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches) and 100 Poems to Save the Earth (Seren). Rachael Boast is the editor of Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe, 2025), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
‘Although Boast’s poems do not depict life in any autobiographical sense, they do show us, perhaps more interestingly, a mind in action, a mind that connects with an electric charge to place, people, language.’ Griffin Prize judges
Gwyneth Lewis:
Gwyneth Lewis was National Poet of Wales and wrote the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre. She's an award-winning poet in both Welsh and English. First Rain in Paradise (Bloodaxe) is her tenth collection. She's also published three memoirs, the latest of which, Nightshade Mother: A Disentangling (Calon) won the 2025 Wales Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for a Sky Arts Award. Her radio play Rays of Darkness about migraine is currently on the BBC iplayer.
Cat Chong:
Cat Chong is a poet, publisher, and essayist who completed their PhD in medical humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as a Nanyang President’s Graduate Scholar in 2024. Their most recent publications include 712 stanza homes for the sun (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), Dear Lettera 32 (Permeable Barrier, 2024), and When Health Becomes Available (Earthbound Press, 2026). They are the co-editor of Osmosis Press and an editorial assistant at Pamenar Press.
Nat Raha:
Nat Raha’s books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (Nightboat Books, 2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018). She is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (Pluto Press, 2024) with Mijke van der Drift. Her writing appears in Versus Versus, The Funambulist, Social Text, Transgender Marxism, Gestures: A Body of Work and Utter Vulnerability: Essays on the Poetry of John Wieners.
Bloodaxe Books:
Bloodaxe Books has revolutionised poetry publishing in Britain over four decades. Internationally renowned for quality in literature and excellence in book design, our authors and books have won virtually every major literary award given to poetry, from the T.S. Eliot Prize, Costa Book of the Year and Pulitzer to the Nobel Prize in Literature. And books like the Staying Alive anthology series have broken new ground by opening up contemporary poetry to many thousands of new readers.
Grant support from Arts Council England makes it possible for Bloodaxe to publish up to thirty new titles a year by a bold and diverse range of new and established writers from Britain, Ireland, America and many other countries, including poetry in translation and proportionally more collections by women poets than any other British imprint.
Part of Lyra – Bristol Poetry Festival 2026
#LyraFest
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Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio
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