Festival co-director, Barry Fentiman Hall introduces our Friday night poetry strand.
Medway River Lit are very proud to partner with Coffee Republic in Chatham. It is important to us that our partners are environmentally ethical and our venues fully accessible. In both of these things Coffee Republic score very highly in our book. And their drinks and cake are pretty darn nice too!
Throughout November on Friday nights, we will be presenting Friday night poetry at 'Poetry Republic', featuring the best poetry and spoken word you are likely to find in Medway or anywhere else right now for that matter!
Kicking things off in style on 1 November are Kent’s very own The Four Poets. Comprising of legendary Medway Poet Bill Lewis, multi award winning Guyanese writer Maggie Harris, acclaimed writer for stage, screen, radio, and certainly on the page Sarah Hehir, and local wandering beat guy Barry Fentiman Hall, The Four Poets first performed at a Colony exhibition at The Halpern Gallery in October 2018. This reading was a huge success and the four poets agreed to read together again.
Maggie Harris has published ten books of poetry, prose and a memoir, Kiskadee Girl. Awards include The Guyana Prize for Literature, The Commonwealth Short Story Prize and The Wales Poetry Award. Bill Lewis was one of the six Medway Poets, a founder member of The Stuckists, and winner of the 2012 Literature Award from the Medway Culture and Design Award. Sarah Hehir is a poet and playwright from the industrial north. Since winning the inaugural BBC Writer's Prize in 2013, she has written for stage, radio, TV and film. Barry Fentiman Hall has written four collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Austerity Soup was launched successfully at last year’s River Lit. He is one half of the team that programmes this festival and is also the editor of Confluence Magazine.
On 8 November, Medway River Lit finally enters the arena of competitive spoken word with The Meanderslam. The first ten performers who come and sign up on the night have 3 minutes to impress the slurping and munching public, not to mention our special guest judge and featured poet (TBA), for the chance to become duly elected Bard Of The Republic for 2024 and win a cash prize too, so what’s not to like?
15 November, (yikes, is it the middle of the month already!?) sees our Poetry Republic fall victim to a friendly invasion by those Big Trouble hordes from over the border in Rochester. Big Trouble is Medway’s oldest and most highly regarded regular live lit night. Big Trouble is run by two fine poets in their own right Bethany Goodwill and David Dykes who have a great instinct about what makes a great headliner: in this case Richard Scott!
Richard Scott's poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. He has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry Mentee and a member of the Aldeburgh 8. His pamphlet 'Wound' (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem 'crocodile' won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho (Faber & Faber) is his first book.
On 22 November we are visited by another great poetic couple in the shapes and forms of Helen Ivory and Martin Figura.
Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence; the resulting pamphlet My Name is Mercy (Fair Acre Press) won a national NHS award. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press Sixteen Sonnets for Care came out in October 2022. His new collection The Remaining Men was published by Cinnamon Press in March 2024.
Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her sixth Bloodaxe Books collection Constructing a Witch, was published in September 2024. She edits Ink Sweat and Tears and teaches creative writing online for the UEA/NCW. She has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Croatian and Greek for Versopolis. Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems (2023) was published in the US by MadHat Press.
We have been hoping to get Helen and Martin to come to the delta for some time now and we are so pleased to finally make it a reality!
Martin and Helen are supported by hometown favourites, Zack Davies (The Inexorable Progression) and Pauline Holmes (Talk to the paw).
Last but certainly not least, the final days of the Poetry Republic are seen out by our festival patron Caroline Bird. Caroline gave an electric performance to kick start the festival last year and it’s only fitting that she returns to see this year’s towards a close by wreaking her special poetic magic.
Caroline has had eight books of poetry published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition (published July 2017) was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Her sixth collection, The Air Year was published in February 2020, and was book of the month in The Telegraph, book of the year in the Guardian, shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and winner of the Forward Prize. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in May 2022. Her most recent book Ambush At Still Lake was described by Roger Robinson as a ‘masterful work, in which lies a deep emotional resonance, illuminating the transformative power of love’
Caroline’s achievements as a writer are something we can all look towards and aspire to. We are very lucky to have her as our patron!
Caroline is supported by popular Kent-based poets, Charlotte Ansell (Deluge) and Sarah Tait (Islands with photographer Mike Goldwater).
Make sure you secure your place by booking a ticket when booking opens shortly!
Pay What You Can: We don't want price to be a barrier to access to literature and books during our festival, so we've introduced Pay What You Can this year. You can buy a free ticket, or pay what you can afford to, or pay it forward by including an extra admission in your ticket price. In this way you can help us to ensure future Medway River Lit events are sustainable.
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