Our next event on Thursday 14th October will be in-person! We welcome readers Alice Owens (prose), Jeremy Page (poetry) and Anna Hayward (prose).
This will be a LIVE event at the John Harvey Tavern in Lewes (upstairs room): please note the start time of 6.30pm
Doors open 6pm, readings start 6.30pm
Tickets £5 (£3 students, and the unwaged and claiming benefit) at the door on the night.
Alice Owens has completed a first novel, Latent Grace, set in her native American South about a WWII German POW camp in a small Alabama town. It is currently with a potential agent. She is also working on a second novel, a prequel to Latent Grace in which a young university student from the rural South finds himself thrust into the maelstrom of World War II as an intelligence officer and codebreaker. Both works probe the impact of global events on isolated communities and the burdens of regional identity. Alice taught creative writing for the University of Sussex. She was founder and editor of the newsletter, Malawi Update, and co-editor of Human Rights and the Making of Constitutions: Malawi, Kenya, Uganda. Formerly, she was a civil rights lawyer in Washington D.C. and a Malawi human rights advocate with NGOs and the United Nations. Most recently, she has led woodland writing workshops for young people from underserved urban communities.
Jeremy Page has published several collections of poems, among them Secret Dormitories (1993), The Alternative Version (2001), In and Out of the Dark Wood (2010) and Closing Time (2014). His most recent collection, The Naming, appeared in September. He has translated poetry by Giacomo Leopardi, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine and Boris Vian, and his versions of the Lesbia poems of Catullus were published by Ashley Press in 2011 as The Cost of All Desire. His plays, Loving Psyche and Verrall of the White Hart, were performed in Bremen (2010) and Lewes (2014) respectively, and his novella, London Calling, was published by Cultured Llama in 2018. He is the founding editor of The Frogmore Papers, now in their 39th year, and lives in Lewes.
Growing up, Anna Hayward spent long, hot summers in the Apennine Mountains of Central Italy with her relations and was always fascinated by stories of her family’s past – hardship, war, and the spectre of Mussolini, intertwined with friendship, secrets and an expectation of how women should behave. Anna wrote for many years – holiday brochures, adverts, strategic reports, business plans until the Italian voices of her past could wait no longer. As a novelist, Anna has been supported by New Writing South as part of their NWS10 scheme for emerging writers and received Arts Council funding for research in Italy and mentoring. She is in the final throes of her novel, Broken Madonna. Think St. Bernadette of Lourdes meets Elena Ferrante.
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 