Poetry Cafe with Roy McFarlane, Sharan Hunjan, Jo Clement, and Anthony Anaxagorou

A highlight of last year's festival, join us again this year for a very special evening of poetry and music as we celebrate the power of words to explore our cultures and communities. Featuring the Brighton-based poet Roy McFarlane, British Indian poet Sharan Hunjan, Newcastle-based poet Jo Clement, and British-born Cypriot poet Anthony Anaxagorou.

Friday 21 June | 7-9pm
Brighton University City Campus, 58-67 Grand Parade, BN2 0JY

FREE ENTRY if you book a ticket for the Poetry Workshop

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham to Jamaican parents and now lives in Brighton. He has held the roles of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Starbucks’ Poet in Residence and Canal Laureate. His debut poetry collection, Beginning With Your Last Breath (2016) was followed by The Healing Next Time (2018), which was nominated for the Ted Hughes Award and Jhalak Prize. He is the editor of Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets From The Midlands (2011).

Sharan Hunjan is a poet and teacher from London. She is part of the radical collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE who published a book of poetry with FEM Press and a zine together. She published her pamphlet of poetry, ‘Hatch’, with the collective with Rough Trade Books in 2020. As part of the collective she has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, British Library and the Tate and appeared in British Vogue. ‘Open Mouths’ is her debut poetry collection published with Rough Trade Books.

Jo Clement is a working-class poet and interdisciplinary maker of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller ethnicity. She has a doctorate, is a Northern Writers' Award winner and lectures in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. She is the managing editor of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine in Newcastle. Her first book-length collection, Outlandish, was longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize.

Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics (2022), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. His second collection, After the Formalities, was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken and the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine. He was made an honorary fellow at the University of Roehampton in 2019.