Date: Saturday 25th April 2026

Venue: Watershed (W3)

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Tickets: £5 / £3 / FREE

Booking Link: 

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

Domestic Shadows: Wayne Holloway-Smith + Guests

Reading/Performance

Presented in association with Simon & Schuster UK

Join Wayne Holloway-Smith (RABBITBOX), Hannah Silva (Crow, Pirate, Fly), Simon Maddrell (lamping wild rabbits) and Degna Stone (Proof of Life on Earth) for an afternoon of bold, formally inventive poetry exploring the faultlines of home. Together, these poetry collections confront domestic threat and conflict, living in defiance, tracing childhood under pressure, queer desire and the shifting dynamics of relationships. By turns tender, feral and unflinching, these readings ask what grows in the shadows of intimacy, and how resilience makes survival possible. 

Artist Bios:

Wayne Holloway-Smith:

Wayne Holloway-Smith edits The Poetry Review. He won the National Poetry Competition in 2018. His collection Love Minus Love was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and The Ledbury Munte Prize in 2020. His new work, RABBITBOX, is out now.

Simon Maddrell:

Simon Maddrell is a Manx poet, editor and educator. Their work has appeared in 27 anthologies, and over 80 magazines including in AMBIT, Gutter, Magma, Poetry Wales, SAND, Southword, Stand, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The London Magazine, The Moth, The Rialto, Under the Radar. Simon's debut collection, lamping wild rabbits from Out-Spoken Press was featured in 'The best recent poetry – review roundup' in The Guardian, 6th Feb 2026. He has seven pamphlets, including Queerfella, which won The Rialto Open Pamphlet Competition, 2020; The Whole Island (Valley Press, 2023); Isle of Sin, a finger in derek jarman's mouth and Patient L1 (Polari Press, 2023, 2024, 2025). Find them on social media @simonmaddrell 

Hannah Silva:

Hannah Silva, author of My Child, the Algorithm, confronts big ideas through formal innovation and a seriously playful approach to language, voice and technology. Their work spans nonfiction, a record, eight BBC radio dramas and two decades of critically acclaimed poetry and performance. 

Crow, Pirate, Fly is Hannah Silva’s long-awaited second poetry collection, out now with Bad Betty Press. It is a glitching manifesto of pain, pleasure, domination and submission. A power play of identities, authors, lovers and mothers, Crow, Pirate, Fly is subversive and compelling, intimate and estranging, animal and alien. Ten years in gestation, this genre-queering text began as a cut up of Kathy Acker's literary terrorism with E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and now emerges as its own thing—dark, wild, innovative and pregnant with desire. There are no safe words.

Degna Stone:

Degna Stone is a poet and poetry editor based in northeast England. A Hawthornden Fellow and Northern Writers' Award recipient, their poem 'Swimming' is prescribed for the Irish Leaving Certificate. They are a contributing editor at The Rialto, a co-founder of Butcher's Dog poetry magazine and the project Manager for the Rebecca Swift Foundation. Their debut collection, Proof of Life on Earth, was published by Nine Arches Press in 2022.

Part of Lyra – Bristol Poetry Festival 2026

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Entry requirements: 16+, any under 18s accompanied by 21+ adult 1:1 ratio — Read more — Read less