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Belfast Book Festival 2022

I very much look forward to this year's edition of the Belfast Book Festival, taking place 10-19 June, and in which I will be participating in a range of ways. Especially since my scheduled participation in 2020, arranged by a different programming team, unfortunately did not happen due to the festival's cancellation that year.

So my contribution to the Belfast Book Festival 2022 takes three different forms:


1/ Reading and Conversation - Literary Collage With Sophie Herxheimer & Christodoulos Makris: This intimate event will query the potential of the many sources of found and discarded language as source texts for the creation of new literary material. Come along and join poets Sophie Herxheimer and Christodoulos Makris for an evening of readings and conversation.

Wednesday 15 June 2022 | 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM | Tickets: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7 | The Crescent Arts Centre


2/ Workshop - Text As Material: Remake Reuse Recycle With Christodoulos Makris: How do you manipulate the superabundance of contemporary language into poetry? Recognising the poetic potential of non-literary sources, and how text fragments can combine and flow into each other, is key. In this interactive workshop you will exercise your faculties of selecting, sampling and reassembling already existing material, and will be guided by the poet Christodoulos Makris to use texts gleaned from their everyday surroundings to make new poetry.

Wednesday 15 June 2022 | 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM | Book A Place: £22 / £20 | The Crescent Arts Centre


3/ Film screening - Filmpoem: Translating City: [This event will feature an excerpt from my experimental poetry film 'Documentary Poetics reprise' (2021: 18 mins) - which you can view in its full slow-burning glory on YouTube.] Join us for a feature-length curation of filmpoems – and film and video excerpts – that foreground poetry. Join poet Kathleen McCracken for a screening which will tease out processes that shape these novel verbal-visual collaborations with a particular focus on two thematic nodes of this year’s festival: translation, and the inherent sociality of our cities. Following the screening, Kathleen will be in conversation with Csilla Toldy. Curation by Natasha Cuddington and Shannon Kuta Kelly.

Saturday 18 June 2022 | 8:30 PM - 10:00 PM | Tickets: Pay What You Want – recommended price £7 | The Crescent Arts Centre


The Belfast Book Festival is now in its 12th year, with festival patrons including Paul Muldoon, Lucy Caldwell and Glenn Patterson. The full festival programme offers an impressive range of events and activities, with the vast majority taking place in The Crescent Arts Centre.

Thanks to Natasha Cuddington for the invitations and curatorial care, to Shannon Kuta Kelly, and to Sophie Hayles, Belfast Book Festival and Crescent Arts Centre CEO.

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