Poets & Players at Burgess Foundation

Manchester regular Poets & Players is a must-go for lovers of words as well as music, presenting performers both established and emerging, with the latest readers Sinéad Morrissey, Charlotte Shevchenko Knight and Tim Tim Cheng. The music this month comes courtesy guitarist Becky Langan.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has served as Belfast Poet Laureate (2013-14). She is the author of six collections, all published by Manchester’s Carcanet Press: There was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009), Parallax (2013) and On Balance (2017). Her awards include first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition and the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Both Through the Square Window and Parallax received the Irish Times Poetry Prize. She was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize in 2013 and the Forward Prize in 2017, and she was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Award in 2020. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight – who you can also catch hosting the Manchester Literature Festival event showcasing Ukrainian poet Oksana Maksymchuk at Manchester Poetry Library on 17 October – is a writer of both British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut poetry collection Food for the Dead, published by Jonathan Cape, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2023 and is shortlisted for the 2024 Forward Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. She is currently an NWCDTP-funded PhD researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University and is based in York.

Tim Tim Cheng is a poet from Hong Kong, currently based between Glasgow and London. She is the author of Tapping At Glass (VERVE, 2023), which was one of the Poetry Society Books of the Year, and the same year co-edited the anthology Where Else: An International Hong Kong Poetry. Her collection The Tattoo Collector will be published by Nine Arches Press this month.

Becky Langan is a percussive fingerstyle guitarist who employs a combination of techniques that explore the outermost reaches of the acoustic guitar. In 2016, she was a semi-finalist in the second series of Sky Arts show Guitar Star, which scoured the UK to discover a world class instrumental guitarist.

Everyone is welcome to P&P and, as always, the event is free (no need to book tickets) – show your appreciation by buying books and CDs from the performers on the day (please note only cash payments are accepted).