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Naomi Foyle (poetry), Barry Smith (poetry) and Kay Syrad (poetry) – Thursday 16 April

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday16th April 2026, featuring Naomi Foyle (poetry), Barry Smith (poetry) and Kay Syrad (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).

Naomi Foyle is a Sussex-based British-Canadian poet, science fiction novelist, dramatist and essayist. Her four poetry collections are: The Night Pavilion, an Autumn 2008 PBS Recommendation, The World Cup (2010) and Salt & Snow (2025), all with Waterloo Press; and Adamantine from PigHog/Red Hen Press (US/UK, 2019). Her ten pamphlets include Red Hot & Bothered, winner of the 2008 Apples & Snakes ‘The Book Bites Back’ competition.  Four of her poems have been ‘Poem of the Week’ in the Guardian, including ‘Salt, Snow, Earth’, one of two filmpoem collaborations with Wendy Pye and Razia Aziz. ASTRA, her theatrical adaptation of her novels The Gaia Chronicles, won the 2022 Brighton Fringe ONCA Green Curtain Award. Naomi is Reader in Critical Imaginative Writing at the University of Chichester, and Poetry and Fiction Editor of Critical Muslim and Gramarye. For her poetry and essays about Ukraine she won the 2014 Hryhorii Skovoroda Prize. 

Barry Smith is a both a poet and an arts festival producer. He is currently Director of the South Downs Poetry Festival and was one of the founding members of the Festival of Chichester. Barry edits the annual magazine, Poetry & All That Jazz. He curates the poetry for Blakefest and is Patron of the Shelley Memorial Project. As a poet, his collection Performance Rites (Waterloo Press) has been described as ‘a masterpiece’ by both Acumen Literary Journal and Sentinel Literary Quarterly. His latest collection, Reeling and Writhing (VOLE Books/Dempsey & Windle) has been endorsed by Louis de Bernieres as ‘mysterious, rich in imagery and feeling.’ His poetry has been published in many magazines and journals as well as being shortlisted for the BBC Proms Poetry and the Culture Matters Bread & Roses awards and nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Kay Syrad’s fourth collection of poetry, yellow noon-day, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2025. She is former Poetry Editor of the longstanding poetry journal Envoi and writes about poetry and art for a range of publications. Kay also co-runs eco-poetry courses and workshops, and has co-edited a number of anthologies, including Wild Correspondings: an eco-poetry source book (Elephant Press, 2021). Other publications include two novels, The Milliner and the Phrenologist (2009/2012) and Send (2015), both with Cinnamon Press; also a number of collaborative art-texts including Exchange (Little Toller, 2015); The evolution of a thought about courage in the Anthropocene (Elephant Press, 2024); and her limited edition book, work  of the lightship men: 1000 tasks (2014) was purchased by the National Maritime Museum for their permanent collection.

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Anika Carpenter (prose), Robin Houghton (poetry), and Maria Jastrzębska (prose) – Thursday 15 January

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 15th January 2026, featuring Anika Carpenter (prose), Robin Houghton (poetry), and Maria Jastrzębska (prose).

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).

Anika Carpenter is a flash fiction author based in Brighton. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions. She runs monthly ekphrastic writing workshops online and in-person flash fiction courses for Evolution Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous online journals and in several flash fiction anthologies. You can find links to her work at www.anikacarpenter.com 

Robin Houghton‘s first full poetry collection, The Mayday Diaries, was published by Pindrop Press in May 2025. She is the author of five pamphlets including Why? And Other Questions which was a joint winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet competition in 2020. Her newest publication is Yo-Yo, a handmade limited edition mini-pamphlet now in its second edition. Robin’s poetry is published widely in magazines including Mslexia, The Frogmore Papers, The Rialto, Poetry News & Magma. With Peter Kenny, she has co-hosted the podcast Planet Poetry since 2020. Robin is a Trustee of The Poetry Society. robinhoughtonpoetry.co.uk

Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw Poland and came to the U.K as a child.  She has published several pamphlets and five full-length collections, most recently Small Oddyseys (Waterloo Press). She co-edited various anthologies including Queer in Brighton (New Writing South). She translated Justyna Bargielska’s selected poems The Great Plan B (Smokestack Press) from Polish and co-translated Iztok Osojnik’s Elsewhere from Slovene. Her own selected poems have been translated into Polish and Romanian. Her work is widely anthologised from Mustn’t Grumble Writing by Disabled Women (Women’s Press) to You’re Never Too Much (First Ink/Macmillan) and is archived in the British Library project Poetry and Translation. She’s been involved as a writer for many projects, Dementia Diaries drama and Snow Q cross-arts project with Lewes Live Literature, Speaking Solidarity anti-bullying of LGBTQ+ students project, What We Leave We Carry Writers’ Mosaic migrant stories project. Currently she is writing a memoir. www.mariajastrzebska.com

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Robert Hamberger (poetry), P.D. Viner (prose), and Phil Vernon (poetry) – Thursday 9 October

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 9th October 2025, featuring Robert Hamberger (poetry), P.D. Viner (prose), and Phil Vernon (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).

Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted and highly commended for Forward prizes. He has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and won The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2023. His poetry has been published in The Observer, The Spectator, New Statesman, Gay Times and The Gay & Lesbian Review. He has twice been featured as the Guardian Poem of the Week and has appeared in British, American, Irish and Japanese anthologies. Blue Wallpaper (Waterloo Press) was shortlisted for the 2020 Polari Book Prize. His memoir A Length of Road: Finding myself in the footsteps of John Clare was published by John Murray in 2021. His fifth collection Nude Against A Rock (Waterloo Press) was published in 2024 and longlisted for the Polari Book Prize, 2025. His website is www.roberthamberger.co.uk.

P. D. Viner is an award-winning crime novelist and film-maker. He is the author of the Dani Lancing/Sad Man series, published by Random House, as well two stand-alone thrillers, The Call and The Choice, published by Hera. He is a book reviewer for crime magazine ShotsMag, and is currently one of the  judges for the Glass Bell award. He acts as a writing mentor and teaches creative writing. He runs The Goldsboro Writing Academy, with Goldsboro Books and the David Headley Literary Agency, and manages the Beyond the Book Festival in Brighton.

Phil Vernon returned to the UK in 2004 after spending two decades in different parts of Africa. Originally trained as a forester, he retired in 2024 after many years in international humanitarian and peacebuilding work. His version of the mediaeval hymn Stabat Mater with music by Nicola Burnett Smith has been performed internationally. His first two poetry collections were Poetry After Auschwitz (Sentinel, 2020) and Watching the Moon Landing (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2022). Foreshadowing (Hedgehog Poetry Press), a micro-pamphlet based on the life of Martin Luther, and his third full collection, Guerrilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly Press), exploring peace and conflict within our social, political and physical environment, were published in 2024. He was one of three poets featured in Tree Poets: Rivers of Stone (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2025). He is currently seeking a publisher for a new collection: Angles of Repose.

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Vanessa Gebbie (prose), Oliver Marlow (poetry), and Sue Roe (prose) – Thursday 12 June

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 12th June 2025, featuring Vanessa Gebbie (prose), Oliver Marlow (poetry), and Sue Roe (prose). Our previously scheduled fourth reader Jean Atkin is unfortunately unable to join us, but will be reading at a future event instead.

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).

Vanessa Gebbie is author of a growing number of diverse books including one novel, five collections of short form fictions, two poetry collections and two guidebooks for writers. Her latest fiction publication is a translation into German of her illustrated novella in flash, Ed’s Wife and Other Creatures. Her latest guidebook for writers is 51 and a half Games and Ideas for Writers (Ad Hoc Books, 2023). She is a freelance creative writing tutor, editor, facilitator and mentor, working closely with Curtis Brown Creative and the Arvon Foundation.  Her writing has been used in iGCSE papers, is on the curriculum in USA, has been commissioned by BBC Radio, for anthologies, and is translated into several languages. Her work has been supported by the Arts Council, by residencies at Gladstone’s Library and Petersfield Museum in the UK, Anam Cara Writers and Artists’ Retreat in Ireland, and a Hawthornden Fellowship. www.vanessagebbie.com

Early in his writing career Michael Schmidt selected Oliver Marlow’s work for ‘New Poetries II’, an international anthology of new writing published by Carcanet Press. His work has been published in four other anthologies and over twenty literary magazines including Agenda, PN Review, Poetry London, Poetry Salzburg Review, Scintilla and The North. His poems have been set to music and performed in venues including Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, and he has given readings of his work on BBC Radio, as well as more recently in Brighton and London. Earlier this year his submission of a debut collection was highly commended in a national competition run by Indigo Dreams Publishing. Prior to becoming a teacher he held various jobs, including being the Andrex puppy back in the nineties. He currently teaches in Eastbourne, and he and his wife Sarah consider Lewes their second home – because it’s just so civilized!

Sue Roe is the author of fiction, poetry, and is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of biography. Her five acclaimed biographies: Gwen John: A Life, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, In Montmartre, In Montparnasse, and her latest (published in March 2025), Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso. She has taught at the Universities of East Anglia and Sussex and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Sussex from 2017 to 2020. Hidden Portraits interweaves the stories of the women who all had significant relationships with Picasso, including Olga Khokhlova, the Ballet Russe dancer, Dora Maar, the successful photographer, and Francoise Gilot, the painter. Sue lives in Brighton.

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Jo Gatford (prose), Olly Todd (poetry) and Nick Hanna (prose) – Thursday 10 April

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 10th April 2025, featuring Jo Gatford (prose), Olly Todd (poetry), and Nick Hanna (prose).

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).

Jo Gatford is a short writer who writes (mostly) short things. Her work has most recently been published by The Fiction Desk, HAD, Flash Frog, and was selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions 2024. She is also a novelist, poet and scriptwriter, and edits other people’s words for her supper. Read her work at jogatford.com, join in with workshops, courses and exercises at The Joy of Fixion, and find her on various socials @jmgatford.

Olly Todd is a former pro-skater from West Cumbria. His poems have appeared in Ambit, The Rialto, Prototype and The Forward Book of Poetry, as well as Radio 3’s The Verb. His pamphlet ‘Odeum Spotlights’ appeared in 2018 with Rough Trade Books. His debut collection, ‘Out for Air’ (Penned in the Margins, 2022), was nominated for the Rathbone Folio Prize and featured in The Guardian’s best poetry roundup. A second collection is forthcoming in 2025 with Broken Sleep Books. He lives with his daughters in East Sussex. 

Nick Hanna was a travel writer and photographer for 25 years working for publishers including National Geographic, the Sunday Times, and Conde Nast. He is the author of 14 non-fiction books, mostly travel guides but also including The Greenpeace Book of Coral Reefs and The Art of Diving. His best-selling book was The Rough Guide to the Millenium. After retiring from travel writing, Nick (along with his wife Kim) hosted meditation and writing retreats at their home in rural East Sussex. He’s also a committed cycle campaigner and the founder of Hastings Urban Bikes and Sussex Greenways. Nick completed New Writing South’s Creative Writing Programme in Hastings in 2017 and is currently writing a novel.

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Pratibha Castle (poetry), Jeremy Page (prose) and Clare Best (poetry) – Thursday 16 January

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 16th January 2025, featuring Pratibha Castle (poetry), Jeremy Page (prose), and Clare Best (poetry). Our previously scheduled prose reader Roz Houchin is unfortunately unable to read but we hope she will join us on another date soon!

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).

Pratibha Castle, Irish born and living in West Sussex, is widely publicised in journals such as Agenda, Lighthouse, Stand, Tears in the Fence, Ink Sweat & Tears, London Grip, The High Window, Orbis, Spelt and forthcoming in Under the Radar and The Stony Thursday Book. She was shortlisted twice in The Bridport Prize, highly commended and received special mention in The Welsh Poetry, Indigo Dreams – collection and single poem – competitions, and recognised in The King Lear, Repton, and Bray Literary competitions. Her second pamphlet Miniskirts in The Waste Land was a Poetry Book Society Winter Selection 2023. A frequent reader on The Poetry Place: West Wilts Radio, Pushcart and Michael Marks nominated, she is currently seeking a home for her full collection which expands on the theme of her prize winning debut  pamphlet A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers (Hedgehog Poetry Press).

Jeremy Page writes poetry and prose. His novella, London Calling (and other stories) was published by Cultured Llama, and he is the author of three full collections of poems, most recently The Naming (Frogmore Press, 2021), and five pamphlets. His versions of the Lesbia poems of Catullus were published as The Cost of All Desire by Ashley Press in 2011 and his play, Verrall of the White Hart, was performed at the White Hart in Lewes in 2014. Formerly Director of the Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex, he has edited the literary journal The Frogmore Papers since 1983.

Clare Best has published a ground-breaking prose memoir, The Missing List (Linen Press 2018) as well as three full collections of poetry and several pamphlets and collaborative works. Her most recent collection is Beyond the Gate (Worple Press 2023). In 2020-21 Clare held a Fellowship at Guildhall School of Music & Drama where she co-created chamber operas and song cycles. Current works-in-progress include a multi-genre memoir, a collaboration with composer Michael Bascom on a musical realisation for soprano and chorus of her long poem ‘Salting’ (from Beyond the Gate) and an audio documentary piece with composer Abel M.G.E. inspired by love letters written during World War II. Clare is an Associate Lecturer with The Open University and a Tutor for The Arvon Foundation. For nearly twenty years she lived in and around Lewes before moving in 2018 to Sudbourne, near the Suffolk coast. www.clarebest.co.uk

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Rachel Cole (prose), John White (poetry) and Callum Murray (drama) – Thursday 10 October

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 10th October 2024, featuring Rachel Cole (prose), John White (poetry), and Callum Murray (drama).

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).

Rachel Cole was originally an Essex Girl. She wanted to become a Sussex Woman, but on her route south she got distracted, and ended up spending twenty-four years living in France, the US, Indonesia and Sweden before eventually making her way to Lewes, where she has remained for the last twenty-four years. She studied or taught in universities in all the countries she lived in en route, and then for twenty years she taught academic writing at Sussex University. In 2015, she co-edited, with Jeremy Page, True Tales from the Old Hill (Frogmore Press). Sometime after that, partly as a result of participating in the Creative Writing course at New Writing South, she started working on a set of stories – The Lydia Stories: tales of a feminist grandmother – which are very loosely based on her experience of bringing up her children in different countries. 

John White was a TV & Cross-media Director & Producer for many years. He was first published as a poet in Michael Horovitz’s seminal review New Departures. He graduated with Distinction from the London Poetry School-Newcastle University Writing Poetry MA in 2021. He has had poems in the New European, Ekphrastic Review, Alchemy Spoon, Frogmore Papers, the newbootsandpantisocracies blog, New Writing Scotland 40, Broken Sleep Masculinity Anthology and longlisted in the 2022 UK National Poetry Competition. In 2023 he was invited to read at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, poems in response to their centenary exhibition, and Natural England published a video of one of his poems online on World Poetry Day 2024.

After a career in journalism, Callum Murray has returned to where he started out, the theatre. Unfriend Me You Fiend is an excerpt from one of four plays he has written in four years. The others are The Thousand Days, Outlandish! and Rebel Rebel. All four are at various stages of production and performance. Callum’s piece will be performed by two actors: Sam Nixon graduated with a degree in drama and has toured with TIE companies and several musical productions. As well as bringing Julie Andrews to life in the 5star ‘Practically Perfect’ she has recently performed as ‘Fagin’ in Oliver Twist at Brighton Open Air Theatre and in several award-winning Brighton and Edinburgh Fringe plays. Phil Nair-Brown has performed in many productions from traditional theatre and immersive theatre through to open air theatre, as well as on screen. Phil has played leading roles in productions such as Queers, By Jeeves, Frankenstein, Blithe Spirit, Hedda Gabler, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, The 39 Steps and Macbeth.

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Charlotte Gann, Christine Cohen Park, Stephen Payne and Peter Wellby – Thursday 13 June

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 13th June 2024, featuring Charlotte Gann (poetry), Christine Cohen Park (prose), Stephen Payne (poetry) and Peter Wellby (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).

Charlotte Gann is a freelance editor from Lewes. The youngest of a big family, she grew up in the town, before going to London (to study English at UCL), then spending a number of years living and working there. Her most recent poetry collection is a pamphlet called Cargo (Mariscat Press), which was published last autumn. She’s also author of two full collections: Noir (HappenStance, 2016) and The Girl Who Cried (HappenStance, 2020); and another pamphlet: The Long Woman (Pighog, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award.

Christine Cohen Park, former tutor on the University of Sussex MA in Creative Writing & Personal Development, is a freelance writer and facilitator of Shared Reading Groups. She has written three novels, the first two, Joining the Grown-ups and The Househusband published by Heinemann, short stories and articles. She has co-edited the prize-winning collection of short stories Close Company published by Virago. She has just completed a fourth novel, Bye Bye Apartheid Road, set in Israel and Palestine. She lives in Lewes.

Stephen Payne was born in Merthyr Tydfil and lives in Penarth, South Glamorgan. His first full collection, Pattern Beyond Chance, was published in 2015 by HappenStance Press and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. His second collection, The Windmill Proof, was published by the same press in September 2021 and followed, in February 2022 by a pamphlet, The Wax Argument & Other Thought Experiments. Payne is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath where his teaching and research interests were in Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction.

Peter Wellby read English at Oxford, then taught in Malaysia, Sweden, Israel, England, Denmark and Rwanda. In December 2023 he won the £1,000 first prize in the Brighton and Hove Arts Council Poetry Competition, having been runner-up in the previous competition. He had a poem broadcast by the BBC and has twice headlined the Eastbourne World Poetry Day. He started writing poetry aged 13, after a student-teacher awarded him 10/10 for rewriting ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, which he will recite at the drop of a hat. Apart from a zanier streak, his poems are generally firmly rooted in personal experience. He has been published extensively online and in print. Maintaining a relatively low poetic profile so far, he now has so many poems in his head, computer and house that this must change.

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John Freeman, Minoli Salgado, Rosie Jackson and Louise Tondeur – Thursday 11 April

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 11th April 2024, featuring John Freeman (poetry), Minoli Salgado (prose), Rosie Jackson (poetry) and Louise Tondeur (prose).

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).

John Freeman’s poems have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and twelve collections, the latest of which is Plato’s Peach (Worple Press). His most recent book is a collaboration with photographer Chris Humphrey, Visions of Llandaff (The Lonely Press). What Possessed Me (Worple) won the poetry section of the Wales Book of the Year award in 2017. He won the Bridport Prize in 2018.  Some of his essays were published in The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets (Stride). He grew up in south London and lived for several years in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where he taught literature and creative writing at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Minoli Salgado is a fiction writer, memoirist and academic who lives a peripatetic life, writing in Lewes and teaching in Manchester. Born in Malaysia to Sri Lankan parents and raised in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia before coming to England to study at a school in Devon, her work explores migration and dislocation, and the possibilities of writing the traumas of exceptional violence. Her books include the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), a book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home (2022) and a forthcoming study, Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) which was written with the support of a Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. She is the winner of the first SI Leeds Literary Prize and has been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth, Devon. Widely published, she has won many awards, including Commended National Poetry Competition 2023, 1st prize Teignmouth 2021, 1st prize Hedgehog Press 2020, 1st prize Poetry Space 2019, 1st prize Wells 2018, 1st prize Stanley Spencer Competition 2017. She was a Hawthornden fellow 2017 and nominated for the Pushcart prize 2021. Her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Other works include Light Makes it Easy (2022), Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird (with Dawn Gorman, 2020), Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline (2020). www.rosiejackson.org.uk

Louise Tondeur worked as Drama teacher before doing an MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. She published two novels with Headline Review called The Water’s Edge and The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls, then wrote a PhD, started a family, and became a Creative Writing lecturer. Since then, she has published several books, articles, stories and poetry. Poetry credits include Perverse, The Rialto, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures and Shearsman, and her first short story collection, Unusual Places, written live in various locations, was published in 2018. Her second short story collection, Invisible, is due from queer press Knight Errant in 2025. Lou currently teaches for the Open University and the University of Brighton. Lou lives in Hove with her wife and son and two black cats and blogs at: www.louisetondeur.co.uk/blog.

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Celia Hunt (prose), Robin Houghton (poetry), Imogen Harris (prose) and Peter Kenny (poetry) – Thursday 11 January

Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 11th January 2024, featuring Celia Hunt (prose), Robin Houghton (poetry), Imogen Harris (prose) and Peter Kenny (poetry). Nb this is an updated line-up since originally advertised, and we hope to continue featuring FOUR readers at each event throughout 2024!

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).

Celia Hunt ran and taught the MA in Creative Writing for Personal Development at the University of Sussex for 14 years. She is the author of three books: Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (2000), Writing: Self and Reflexivity (with Fiona Sampson, 2006), and Transformative Learning through Creative Life Writing (2013). She also edited (with Fiona Sampson) The Self on the Page: Theory and Practice of Creative Writing in Personal Development (1998) and has had poetry published. She retired from Sussex in 2010 and in the last few years has been writing a self-exploratory book on her experience of learning across her life. It incorporates and explores poems and extracts from fiction she wrote in the past and recreates episodes from her life using literary techniques. She will be reading a section from this book for Needlewriters.

Robin Houghton is the author of four poetry pamphlets: Why? And Other Questions, joint winner of the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition 2019, All the Relevant Gods, joint winner of the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition 2018, The Great Vowel Shift, (Telltale Press, 2014) and Foot Wear, a handmade limited-edition illustrated micro-pamphlet. Her work is widely published in magazines and anthologies and she was awarded the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize in 2013. Non-fiction books include A Guide to Getting Published in UK Poetry Magazines (Telltale, 2020) and Blogging for Creatives (Ilex Press, 2012). Robin co-hosts the podcast Planet Poetry, now in its fourth season, and she compiles a (free) quarterly list of poetry magazines’ submissions windows. Her first full collection, The Mayday Diaries, is forthcoming from Pindrop Press in 2024. Her ‘other life’ is in choral singing; she is co-director of The Lewes Singers. robinhoughtonpoetry.co.uk

Imogen Harris is a graduate from the Oxford University Creative Writing Masters program. She is a freelance writer and a publicist in the art industry, as well as an award-winning voice performer for the production company Rusty Quill.

Peter Kenny co-hosts the Planet Poetry podcast with Robin Houghton. Poetry publications include Sin Cycle (e.ratio, New York 2020) The Nightwork (Telltale Press 2014) and A Guernsey Double (2010, Guernsey Arts Commission). His dark fiction short stories have appeared in Supernatural Tales, Horla, Frogmore Papers – and several US publications. His six comedy plays, include A Glass of Nothing, performed in Brighton and Edinburgh. An ongoing collaboration with classical composer Dr Matthew Pollard has resulted in high-concept pieces such as This Concert Will Fall In Love With You (2010) findable on Spotify.