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.
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 