Scottish poet, performer and theatre maker Ellen Renton is joined by Kate Ireland for the Manchester leg of her 2026 UK poetry tour.

Ellen Renton is a poet, performer, and theatre maker from Edinburgh. Since performing her own work for the first time in 2015, she has read at venues including The Scottish Parliament, The Roundhouse, and Leith Theatre, and at festivals such as Verve, and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. While always keeping poetry at its core, her work is varied and has included theatre, journalism, and multimedia collaborations.

In 2016, with support from The Nurturing Talent Fund, she released Beginnings – a musical collaboration and her debut audio collection. She was the winner of The Time Is Now Prize ahead of COP21, and performed at the First Minister’s National Advisory Council for Women and Girls in 2019. She has been commissioned by organisations including Visionary UK, RNIB, BBC Radio 6 Music, and Capability Scotland, and has led workshops for STAND, Liberty Festival, and Edinburgh University.

In 2021, her debut poetry pamphlet was published with Stewed Rhubarb Press and she undertook a Scottish Emerging Writer Residency at Cove Park. Her poem One Tree Hill was included in Best Scottish Poems 2022. In 2022/23 she was an associate artist with Disability Arts Online and the Edwin Morgan Trust and an Imaginate Jerwood Fellow. At the end of 2023 she was a recipient of an RSL Literature Matters Award.