5 Caledonian Road
Sat 12 Sept · 19:00 · £163
@ For our next poetry evening we welcome to London the marvellously talented Jay Gao! He will be launching his mysterious, stirring new collection, ‘The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in your ear, Thriving Slumber’, published by Carcanet. Joining him we welcome a whole host of incredible poets: Dom Hale, Alycia Pirmohamed, Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Azad Ashim Sharma, Will Harris, Nina Mingya Powles, and Mantra Mukim. OUR POETS: Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is forthcoming in Fall 2026 from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award. Dom Hale is an editor of Ludd Gang, the magazine of the Poets’ Hardship Fund, and Chaff Press. His recent books of poetry include First Nettles (The Last Books, 2025) and Faint Portal (Distance No Object, 2023), as well as two collaborations with the poet Tom Crompton: Mud Ramps, an essay on poetics, and Earthstepper, two translations from the Exeter Book (both Gong Farm, 2025 and 2026). Alycia Pirmohamed is the author of the collection Another Way to Split Water and a co-author of the collaborative pamphlet this too is a glistening. Her nonfiction debut Shorelines is newly out with Canongate Books, and her second book of poems, Then the Lake Shifts is forthcoming next year. Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer, and artist whose work has appeared widely in publications including the London Review of Books, LitHub, and The Atlantic. She is the winner of an Eric Gregory Award, and her critically acclaimed debut poetry book, QUIET, won the Folio Prize for Poetry, the John Pollard International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. QUIET is published by Faber in the UK and in North America by Alfred A. Knopf. Azad Ashim Sharma is the director of the87press and as Editor at Philosophy and Global Affairs, the CLR James Journal, and The Hythe Review. He is a PhD Candidate in English and Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Boiled Owls (Nightboat Books / Out-Spoken Press, 2024) which was shortlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize. His second collection Ergastulum: Vignettes of Lost Time (Broken Sleep Books, 2022) was the recipient of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Guillén Award. In July 2025, Azad was inaugurated as the Poet Laureate of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He lives in South London. Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), published by Granta and Wesleyan University Press, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, 2018). He has won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre) with Delaina Haslam in 2022, and helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule. Siblings, a conversation between Harris, Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in 2024. He received a Burgess Fellowship from the University of Manchester and was a Fellow at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination in Paris from 2024-25. He is currently working on a project about social care. Nina Mingya Powles is a writer and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in London. She is the author of a food memoir, Tiny Moons, and a collection of essays, Small Bodies of Water. Her debut poetry collection Magnolia was a finalist for the Ondaatje Prize, the New Zealand Book Awards, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her most recent poetry collection, In the Hollow of the Wave, was published in 2025. She is currently working on a book about fabric, sewing and memory. Mantra Mukim is a poet and essayist from Raipur, India, currently based in Oxford. His debut collection, Glitchwork (the87press), came out in April 2026. This is a free event, though you may reserve a copy of Jay’s book if you wish.
Not the same tradition as the lineage above — a genuinely different thread to pull, if you want one.