Please join Poets & Players on Saturday 26 September 2026, 2.30-4.00 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation for a wonderful line-up of poets and musicians.

The event is free and everyone is welcome (no need to book tickets). Performers often bring along books and CDs to sell, please note we are only able to accept cash payments.

Jean Sprackland’s latest collection Goyle, Chert, Mire is a book-length sequence about place, time, illness and recovery. Her previous collections include Tilt, which won the Costa Poetry Award in 2008. Jean is also the author of three books of non-fiction, most recently Night Vision: In search of the true dark. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester Met.

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber/Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Her work has been published, or is forthcoming, in Granta, the TLS, Wasafiri, The Poetry Review, Callaloo and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London, Magma and ignitionpress.

Carlton Rose is a poet from Wolverhampton who lives in Manchester. He recently won New Writing North’s Northern Debut Award for Poetry. Carlton’s work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Magma, Ambit and various other publications.

Musicians TBC