Our next event on Thursday 25th November when we will be welcoming readers John Davies (poetry), Derek Allen (prose) and Sally Festing & Peter Wallis (poetry).
This will be a LIVE event at the John Harvey Tavern in Lewes (upstairs room): please note the start time of 6.30pm
John Davies
John’s published work includes two pamphlets, The Nutter in the Shrubbery and Glove Poems and the full collection Shedman, as well as Our Storeys, a book about art and poetry in healthcare written with artist Sue Ridge. He was the first non-Irish editor of The Stony Thursday Book, an annual anthology published in Ireland. In 2018, Jizz, New and Selected Poems was published in the UK by Kingston University Press and as Nest in the USA by Red Hen Press. He won third prize in this year’s Wales Poetry Award. His commissioned work includes poems engraved into the windows of a learning centre on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, to major hospital projects and a poem for the High Weald AONB.
John has perhaps been best known as his literary funster alter ego, Shedman, the original itinerant poet in a shed who has appeared at numerous festivals and events. His website is johndavies.net.
Derek Allen
For many years, Derek Allen has been a frequent visitor to Denmark. He became fascinated by the stories he heard about the remarkable escape of most of Denmark’s Jews from the Nazis in World War 2. They also received assistance, often at considerable risk, from their fellow Danes who decided to help them flee the Germans. In his book, The Crossing, a young Jewish woman, Anna, her son and parents, have their lives brought to a halt as they become refugees in their own country and they are forced to leave their home and possessions, to avoid being captured. On their journey out of Denmark, they are never certain that the decisions they are forced to make will lead them to safety. The Crossing is Derek’s first book and is being readied for submission. He lives in Lewes and works in healthcare as a chiropractor.
Sally Festing & Peter Wallis
These two prize-winning poets present poems about the head, both in its physical and mental aspects. Peter has just returned from a Hawthornden Fellowship in a Scottish castle, and Sally’s sixth book of poetry is White Queen’s Last Stand, out this year with KFS. They will read, however, largely from earlier work.
How does repeated brain surgery impact on families? What if the patient has an identical twin? The answers come, in Andrew McMillan’s words, in poems that see “life as something tentative as well as tender”. Similarly, how can the effects of something like schizophrenia, bear on future generations? Family history and a cache of intimate letters suggested Sally’s answers.
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.
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: 
needlewriters.co.uk 