Janet Sutherland (poetry), Lynsey Main (prose) and Richard Skinner (poetry) – Thursday 12 October

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 12th October 2023, featuring Janet Sutherland (poetry), Lynsey Main (prose) and Richard Skinner (poetry).

This will be a LIVE event at the John Harvey Tavern in Lewes (upstairs room): doors 6pm for a 6.30pm start.

Tickets £5 (£3 students/unwaged and claiming benefit) available on the door. 

Books will be for sale on the night (cash only please).

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Janet Sutherland

Janet Sutherland grew up on a dairy farm, she is the author of five poetry collections, most recently The Messenger House (Shearsman Books, 2023). Her previous collections all from Shearsman are Home Farm (2019), Bone Monkey (2014), Hangman’s Acre (2009) and Burning the Heartwood (2006).   The Messenger House, a hybrid collection, is about her great-great-grandfather’s travels to Serbia in the 1840’s with his friend Mr Gutch, a Queen’s Messenger. Her poems are widely anthologised and published in magazines such as New Statesman, The Spectator and The North.  A critical essay on the poet Charles Reznikoff appeared as an afterword to two new editions of his work, Holocaust, in the UK (Five Leaves Publishing, 2009) and USA (Black Sparrow Press, 2007). She won the 2017 Kent and Sussex Poetry Prize and received a Hawthornden Fellowship for 2018.  She has an MA in American Poetry and lives in Lewes, East Sussex. https://www.janetsutherland.co.uk/

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Lynsey Main

Lynsey Main grew up near Sheffield where her Dad made tools for Spear and Jackson. After migrating south to be a mature English Language student at Sussex University, Lynsey met her husband and spent many years working as a script writer in Brighton creating online learning content – a role that made her an expert in a range of useful subjects from smallpox to sewage treatment. She also wrote stories in her spare time. Two children, two dogs and many years later, she is dedicating more time to the stories. It was during the Creative Writing Programme with New Writing South in 2019 that she began her first novel, Sleep Switch, influenced by her own chronic insomnia and travels in South East Asia.  When she’s not writing, working, or nurturing two teenagers, she can be found up on the South Downs with the dog, walking and plotting.

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Richard Skinner

Richard Skinner has published seven books of poetry. His most recent collections are Dream into Play (Poetry Salzburg, 2022), Cut Up (Vanguard Editions, 2023) & White Noise Machine (Salt, 2023). Richard is Director of the Fiction Programme at Faber Academy. He also runs a small press, VanguardEditions, was the co-editor of Magma 80 and is the current editor of 14 magazine.