POETS

ROSALIND JANA

Rosalind Jana is a poet, author, and journalist. Having studied English Literature at Oxford (writing her debut non-fiction book Notes on Being Teenage alongside her studies), she's also written for places including British Vogue, BBC Radio 4, AnOther, Dazed, Broadly, Refinery29, Buzzfeed, So it Goes, and Suitcase. Now in her early twenties, her first collection Branch and Veinhas a poise and silvery assurance that belies her youth. A poem from the collection, Hollow, was highly commended by the Forward Prize 2018. 

NIALL MCDEVITT

Niall McDevitt is an Irish poet resident in London, author of three critically acclaimed collections of poetry, b/w(Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo(International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits: Jerusalem Colportage(New River Press, 2016). He is a walking artist who specialises in the psychohistory and psychogeography of the canonical poets of London, such as Shakespeare, Blake, Rimbaud, and Yeats. In collaboration with New River Press he began the Niall McDevitt London Poetry Walks which currently take place every Saturday and Sunday at 2pm around the city. Heathcote Williams described his work as "savagely witty". In 2016 he was invited to read in Iraq at the Babylon Festival for International Arts and Culture. Following this he wrote the major work Babylon (a neoliberal theodicy),forthcoming from New River Press, which adapts Akkadian-Sumerian texts to critique western globalism. 

ROBERT MONTGOMERY

Robert Montgomery is best known for his billboard poems. Black and Blue Literary Journal has said of his work, "To encounter the work of Robert Montgomery is to make a tender encounter whose tenderness is enhanced by the public, communal quality of his work. To encounter his work is to have your body filled with a sad thunder and your head filled with a sad light. He is a complete artist and works in language, light, paper, space. He engages completely with the urban world with a translucent poetry. His work arrives at us through a kind of lucid social violence. No one has blended language, form and light in such a direct way."

HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS

Heathcote Williams is the author of ‘Whale Nation’, ‘Sacred Elephant’, ‘Falling for a Dolphin’, ‘Autogeddon’, and ‘Royal Babylon’. He invented a particular kind of long-form lyric and polemic poetry, which was an important early catalyst for the ecological movement. Philip Hoare called 'Whale Nation', "the most powerful argument for the newly instigated worldwide ban on whaling." Ted Hughes said, "his poems are overwhelming, brilliant, cunning, dramatic and wonderfully moving- a steady accumulation of grandeur and dreadfulness". Heathcote has been a powerful counter culture figure in Britain for five decades, instrumental in the underground journal The International Times and the creation of the squatters free state Frestonia in Notting Hill. He has mastered his own distinct brand of long-form lyrical-moral poetry, which is at once uplifting and educating, and he remains an inspirational and sentinel figure for younger generations of British anti-authoritarians.

BARBARA POLLA

Barbara Polla began her career as a medical doctor and scientist working at Harvard and University Paris V René Descartes. She is the author of hundreds of academic papers published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation and The American Journal of Physiology and The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA. She was a Liberal MP in her native Switzerland, fighting for the abolition of prisons and abortion rights. Today she is a curator and owner of the innovative gallery Analix Forever in Geneva. She has written extensively on science, art, and gender in both French and English as well as several novels and various poetic prose.

LISA LUXX

Lisa Luxx is a writer, performer, philosopher and activist of British Syrian heritage. Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, VICE, TEDx, BBC Radio Leeds, ITV and heralded as one of the UK’s top four queer poets by Diva magazine. Winner of the 2018 Outspoken Prize for Performance Poetry, she was also shortlisted for Peace Poetry Prize and Saboteur Awards Best Spoken Word Performer 2017. Her work has been published in magazines, books and newspapers internationally, by the likes of: i-D, Tate Britain, The Daily Telegraph, The International Times, Tribe de Mama (US), The Numinous (US), The Sunday Times, Verve Poetry Press, Wasafiri, and Sage Press (India). In 2017, Luxx released a collection of poems and essays called The 4thBrain; a journey for connection through sisterhood, internet and revolution. Dazed and Confused Magazined said of her work: “Her poems are sensitive and revolutionary – always kind, always fierce.”