Our next event is on Thursday 16th January 2020, upstairs at the John Harvey Tavern, Bear Yard, Cliffe High St, Lewes BN7 2AN.
Doors open 7pm, readings start 7.45pm.
Tickets £5 (£3 students, and the unwaged and claiming benefit) at the door on the night.
Readers: Emily Elgar (prose), Ian McEwen (poetry) and Umi Sinha (prose).
Emily Elgar is the author of psychological suspense international bestseller If You Knew Her published by Little, Brown in 2016 and in nine other countries. Her second novel Grace is Gone will be published in early 2020; she’s currently working on her third novel. She lives in Lewes with her husband and young son where she can usually be found pacing the Downs for inspiration.
Ian McEwen’s poems have appeared widely in magazines including Long Poem Magazine, Shearsman, Poetry Wales and Poetry Review. His pamphlet of landscape format poems, The Stammering Man, was a winner in the Templar competition 2010. He has published a collection (Intermittent beings, Cinnamon 2013) and two further pamphlets (The Sideways for it, Flipped Eye, 2017 and White Goods, Flarestack, 2018). Ian is a board member of the National Association of Writers in Education and tries to encourage an active poetry scene in Bedford, where he lives.
Umi Sinha taught at Sussex and Brighton Universities, and now teaches on the Creative Writing Programme at New Writing South. She runs Writing Clinic, a mentoring service for writers, and an oral storytelling club. Her first novel, Belonging (Myriad Editions, 2015) was published in Poland, Portugal and India, and shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Waverton Good Read Award 2017. She is working on a second novel. Website: umisinha.com
Robert Hamberger has been shortlisted for a Forward prize and awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship. His poetry has been featured on the Guardian Poem of the Week website and in various British, American and Japanese anthologies. He has published six poetry pamphlets and three full-length collections. His fourth collection Blue Wallpaper is forthcoming from Waterloo Press. His prose memoir with poems A Length of Road will be published by John Murray in 2020. 
Martin Nathan has worked as a labourer, showman, pancake chef, fire technician, and a railway engineer. His short fiction has been published by Tangent Press, HCE and Grist. His novel A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing, his poetry by Finished Creatures. He contributed a monologue to Young Vic’s ‘My England’ project. Website: 
Anna Reckin is a poet and writer based in Norwich. Her second collection, Line to Curve, appeared from Shearsman in 2018, and she has had poems, essays and reviews published in Poetry Wales, Jacket2, Long Poem Magazine, and a selection in the anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets. She was longlisted for the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize in 2018.
Clare Best’s first poetry collection, Excisions, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize, 2012. Other publications include Treasure Ground, Breastless, CELLand Springlines. Clare’s prose memoir The Missing List (Linen Press) was published last year. Tonight she will read from her new poetry collection Each Other (Waterloo Press 2019) – ‘closely observed, exquisitely wrought poems about love and its endurance’ (Mara Bergman). Clare lived in Lewes for twenty years and co-founded Needlewriters – she now lives near the Suffolk coast. Website: 
Marek Urbanowicz has been published in a number of magazines, notably Agenda, The Frogmore Papers and its offshoots. Marek recently completed an MA in Voice Studies at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and is currently a member of the RADA Elders Company. He is very interested in the relationship between poetry and how it is voiced. He is a well-known Brighton acupuncturist, having qualified in 1979.
Jeremy Page has edited The Frogmore Papers since 1983. His short stories have been widely published, and he is the author of several collections of poems, including Closing Time (Pindrop Press) and Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography (Frogmore Press). He has also written plays: Loving Psyche was performed in Bremen in 2010, and Verrall of the White Hart in Lewes in 2014. A novella, London Calling, will be published by Cultured Llama in September (2018).
Robert Seatter
After a childhood spent mainly in Leicestershire, James Flynn studied in Oxford and has worked in ‘Europe’ as well as in London. His poems have appeared in magazines sadly defunct (14, The SHOp and Smiths Knoll) and happily still extant (
Matt Freidson has published more than twenty short stories, including in Best New American Voices, The Needlewriters anthology, Ontario Review, Confrontation, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He is a former Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing at various places, including Birkbeck and City University. Currently he works for 
needlewriters.co.uk 