With Benjamin Zephaniah stating ‘I can’t take my ears off her’, Kate Tempest describing her poetry as ‘welcoming, galvanising and beautiful’ and fans ranging from Emma Watson, Robin Ince, Pink and Tim Minchen, Ted Hughes Award winner Hollie McNish is a poet whose readings are not to be missed. She is an Arts Foundation Fellow in Spoken Word, has garnered over ten million YouTube views for her online poetry performances and was the first poet to record at London’s famed Abbey Road Studios.
Here, she will be joining us to perform poems, read from and chat honestly and openly from her latest poetry collections.
Expect strong language as she talks fruit and flesh, guilt, sex, politics, death, breasts, transformers and more.
Books will be available to purchase at the event. There will be a book signing afterwards
About the author
Hollie McNish is a published UK poet based between Cambridge and Glasgow. She has two previous poetry collections – Cherry Pie and Papers and an album, Versus, which made her the first poet to record at Abbey Road Studios, London.
In February 2016, Blackfriars published her memoir of poetry and parenthood, Nobody Told Me, with which she won the Ted Hughes award and about which the Scotsman stated ‘The world needs this book’. Her latest poetry collection, Plum, is published by Picador.
‘She writes with honesty, conviction, humour and love. She points out the absurdities we’ve grown too used to and lets us see the world with fresh eyes’ Kate Tempest
‘Her rhymes have a driving quality, urgent words pinning down fleeting feelings’ Observer
‘Wonderful’ Davina McCall
‘Will make you laugh and cry with her’ Red Magazine
Support is from Vanessa Kisuule, a writer and performer based in Bristol. Her work has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, The Guardian, Blue Peter, Sky TV, Don’t Flop and TEDx. She has performed in Vienna, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Bangladesh, Barcelona, Oslo, Finland, Romania, New York, and Brazil. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books: Joyriding The Storm (2014) and A Recipe For Sorcery (2017) and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. In 2017 she won The Jerwood Micro Arts Bursary and The Leverhulme Arts Scholarship, and her one woman show SEXY toured with the support of Arts Council England. She is currently the Bristol City Poet for 2018 – 2020.
