Date: Saturday 18th April 2026

Venue: St. George’s Bristol (Glass Studio)

Time: 14:30 - 15:30

Tickets: £5 / £3 / FREE

✅ Live Streamed (book a ‘Live Stream Ticket’ at checkout)

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

Working Class Poetics: Karen McCarthy Woolf, Matthew Rice & John McCullough

Presented in association with Fitzcarraldo Editions, Bloomsbury and Bloodaxe Books

Join Karen McCarthy Woolf (Unsafe), Matthew Rice (plastic) and John McCullough (Crowd Voltage) for an afternoon of poetry exploring class, labour and the forces that shape working lives.

Unsafe reckons with the colonial past that has shaped the UK and its ally the US, pulling us into the processes of gentrification, police brutality and class division. A moving, critical and fiercely intelligent epic, weaving together poetry, documentary and images.

Set during a single twelve-hour night shift in a factory, plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker turned up. It brings together memoir, ekphrasis and satire, based on Matthew Rice’s own experience working in a plastic moulding factory for ten years.

Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community. It probes fragmentation within groups and individuals – disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness.

Karen McCarthy Woolf:

Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf, FRSL, PhD, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year.

As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026): a ‘taut’ and ‘hypnotic’ (Guardian) poetic meditation on the sacred, the city and our access to nature. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has performed her work everywhere from The Royal Festival Hall, Kings Place and Barbican, to venues across Asia, Europe and the Americas. 

Matthew Rice:

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. Poems have appeared in Granta, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, the Guardian, BOMB magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Dark Horse, and in anthologies The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 (Eyewear), Hold Open the Door: A Commemorative Anthology from The Ireland Chair of Poetry (UCD Press / University of Chicago Press), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber).  He holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University, Belfast, and a PhD from The Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, where he has taught Introduction to Creative Writing. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (Summer Palace Press) was included on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s top ten books of the year. His latest book is plastic, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US). He is currently the Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow at The Seamus Heaney Centre.

John McCullough:

John McCullough lives in Hove. His book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. John’s collections have been Books of the Year for publications including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph and he also won the Polari First Book Prize. The poem ‘Flower of Sulphur’, from his fourth collection Panic Response (Penned in the Margins), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His fifth collection, Crowd Voltage, will be published in March 2026 by Bloodaxe.

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

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Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less