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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