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 Katharine Towers, Sascha Akhtar and Victoria Gatehouse. The music this month comes courtesy Chris Davies and Rachael Gladwin.

Katharine Towers has published three collections with Picador, most recently Oak (2021), which was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. Her debut collection The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and The Remedies (2016) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. A pamphlet The Violin Forest was published by HappenStance in 2019 and in 2023 The Maker’s Press published let him bring a shrubbe, a pamphlet exploring the life and music of English composer Gerald Finzi.

Sascha Akhtar is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Greenwich. She performs internationally, and has been facilitating teachings in magical practice and poetry at the Poetry School exclusively since 2019. Sascha Aurora Akhtar’s re-issued collection The Grimoire of Grimalkin, originally published by Salt Publishing in 2007, when it was declared a ‘contemporary masterpiece’, came out in a new edition with Prototype last year and was featured in Rebecca Tamas’s best recent poetry roundup in The Guardian in January 2025. Pakistan-born Akhtar’s latest books are ∑Void Song∩ ≠ Futurepast Sequence Of,… (Intergraphia Press), and her other six poetry collections include The Whimsy of Dank Ju-Ju (Emma Press) and the innovative tarot deck of poetry Only Dying Sparkles (on Manchester’s zimZalla). Other writings appear in the Of Myths and Mothers anthology published by Manchester’s Fly On The Wall Press in 2022. Akhtar reently published a book of translations from Urdu with Oxford University Press and she has received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 AK Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English awarded by the Association for Asian Studies.

Victoria Gatehouse is an award-winning poet and children’s writer, and a zoologist. Her first poetry collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is published by Indigo Dreams. Her pamphlet The Mechanics of Love (Smith | Doorstop) was selected as a Laureate’s Choice by Carol Ann Duffy, and she is a Pushcart nominee. Her poetry has been broadcast on BBC radio and widely published in magazines including The Rialto, Mslexia, Magma, The North, Anthropocene and Butcher’s Dog. She is a three-times winner of The Poetry News Members’ Competition, and was highly commended for the Gingko Prize in 2023. She grew up in Leeds and is based in West Yorkshire.

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).