Out-Spoken: July

Immerse yourself in an evening of poetry and music from artists on the rise and at the top of their game, in a monthly event hosted by poet and author Joelle Taylor.

Out-Spoken is the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night, bringing the hottest UK and international poets to perform alongside world-class musicians every month.

Each monthly gig is hosted by TS Eliot- and Polari Prize-winning poet Taylor, with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield spinning the best in reggae, soul and R&B throughout the evening.

This month’s edition features poetry from Mona Arshi, Fiona Benson and Susannah Dickey.

Mona Arshi’s debut poetry collection, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods, was published in 2019 and her novel Somebody Loves You in 2021; the latter was shortlisted for the Goldsmith Prize. She has been appointed as Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool and Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is also co-editor of an anthology of nature poetry, Nature Matters, which will be published this year. Prior to her career in poetry, she worked as a human rights lawyer, often representing refugees and women fleeing domestic violence.

Fiona Benson lives in Devon with her husband and their two daughters. She has published three previous collections of poetry, all of which were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize: Bright Travellers, which won the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry’s Prize for First Full Collection, Vertigo & Ghost, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and won both the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and Ephemeron, which was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the London Hellenic Prize.

Susannah Dickey is a poet and novelist from Derry and the author of four pamphlets – I had some very slight concerns, genuine human values, bloodthirsty for marriage and and Oh!, and two novels, Tennis Lessons and Common Decency. ISDAL, her debut poetry collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her poems have been published in The Poetry Review, The TLS, Poetry London, and Ireland Review, among others. She is an Eric Gregory Award winner, a prize granted for a collection by poets under the age of 30.

Presented in association with Out-Spoken.