Marjorie’s Table
8:30 am - 9:00 am
In this friendly morning meet-up led by Forward Prize-winning poet Marjorie Lotfi, you’ll look at a cluster of poems by one of the poets from the festival’s online programme, reflect briefly on craft, and then spend some time writing in response.
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Combing the Shoreline
10:00 am - 11:15 am
Be inspired by our shorelines, as you join artist and beachcomber extraordinaire Emily Dubious on a Portobello beachcomb. You’ll then use your found treasures as prompts to create new work, in a half-hour writing workshop led by poet Lisa Fannen.
Get TicketsInherited Stories: A Masterclass with Sarah Howe
10:30 am - 12:00 pm
Join Sarah Howe for a workshop exploring the stories we inherit and the fertile space where generational memory and ancestral lore shade into myth and hearsay. We’ll look at the myths about ourselves that others impose on us, thinking about inherited and newly invented poetic forms, before generating new drafts.
Get TicketsTakeover: On the Shoreline of Infinity
10:45 am - 11:40 am
Shoreline of Infinity is Scotland’s brightest and best Science Fiction magazine, publishing stories, poetry and articles since 2015. Join us as we investigate the liminal, speculating about the future and considering the past from our vantage point of the ever-shifting sands of the present. Bram E Gieben, Medha Singh, Jeda Pearl, Lesa Ng and Rachel Plummer will be performing along with our MC Pippa Goldschmidt.
Get TicketsAn Open Book Tour of Scotland
11:45 am - 12:40 pm
Join Open Book writers from across the country for a session packed with humour, storytelling and words to make you think. You’ll hear a mixture of individual work and collaborative poems responding to themes such as Measuring, Comfort, Friendship, One Last Time, and many other things in between.
Get TicketsStates of Emergency: Writing the Plague
11:45 am - 12:40 pm
Join Polly Atkin and Niall O’Gallagher to discuss two collections which explore solitude and connection in a time of plague. Niall will be sharing translations from his upcoming Gaelic novella-in-verse Litreachan Plàighe (Plague Letters), while Polly will read from Emergency Dream, a collection which insistently centres disabled joy and disabled rage.
Get TicketsExperimenting with Words and Music
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Want to collaborate with musicians, but not sure where to start? This workshop with Iona Lee, poet and frontwoman of poetry-led band Acolyte, and DJ Nikki Kent has you covered. We’ll play with rhythm and tone, listening and responding, reflect on performance, experimentation and the musicality of language, and have the chance to try it all out.
Get TicketsContested Bodies
12:45 pm - 1:40 pm
Known for compelling, innovative and original work, in recent collections Kim Moore and Charlotte Van den Broeck each explore the female body as contested landscape. Kim’s The House of Broken Things conjures an intimate atmosphere of haunted domesticity, while Charlotte’s The Inside of a Stone explores the emotional resonance between desert landscapes and womanhood.
Get TicketsWriting Between Languages
1:15 pm - 2:15 pm
Discover the creative potential which exists between and within languages, with performances from three incredible poets. Between them Ghazal Mosadeq, Asmaa Azaizeh and Robbie MacLeòid write across English and Persian, Arabic and Gaelic. Join them for a multilingual poetical adventure!
Get TicketsTakeover: Art Riot
1:45 pm - 2:45 pm
Join Art Riot Press, the small press with a big attitude, bringing you the very best new voices from Scotland and beyond! Enjoy performances by Julie Laing, Aditya Narayan, and EmmaClaire Brightlyn alongside some cheeky poetic audience participation shenanigans, hosted by Versaye duo, Lorna Callery-Sithole and Wendy Miller.
Get TicketsEkphrasis: The Secret Rewards of Larceny
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Join legendary poet Kwame Dawes for this online workshop on ekphrasis! After a discussion about the ways in which ekphrasis (the description of a work of visual art) has worked in some meaningful poetry, you’ll attempt your own ekphrasis poems making use of artbooks available online as we enjoy and steal from great art.
Get TicketsMake A Tiny Poetry Game with Tinderbox
Across the Festival, Sat 14th Nov
2:45 pm - 4:15 pm
Make your poetry interactive, learn about game design, and make your own tiny pixel-art game using Bitsy, a little engine for little games, worlds, and stories! Led by Tinderbox Collective, this workshop is open to any level of experience with games, including complete beginners.
Get Ticketspool burn lock and sluice
3:00 pm - 3:55 pm
During our new residency programme, poet Iain Morrison and visual artist Corin Sworn explored Little Sparta Ian Hamilton Finlay’s art garden, becoming fascinated by the challenges of keeping this living artwork in good health during ongoing climate catastrophe. Join us for an artist’s talk about the garden and a performance of Iain and Corin’s new work.
Supported by the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay
Get TicketsIn Conversation: Karen Solie and Sarah Howe
3:00 pm - 3:55 pm
Karen Solie’s 2025 T.S. Eliot Prize winning collection, Wellwater, is described as holding “two sentiments, The world is a beautiful place / The world is a terrible place, in perfect equipoise”. Also shortlisted, Sarah Howe’s Foretokens navigates the complex inheritance of family, language and colonialism. Join them to discuss these luminous collections.
Get TicketsTracing the Shoreline
4:00 pm - 4:55 pm
Within this year’s festival theme, The Space Between, we’re exploring shorelines, their significance, power and the threat posed by climate crisis to our coastlines. Garry Mackenzie will join us with Firth, a poetic portrait of the Firth of Forth. Alycia Pirmohamed will read from her upcoming collection, as well as her memoir, Shorelines.
Get TicketsPoetry as Witness, Poetry as Protest
4:15 pm - 5:10 pm
Hannah Lavery and Don Mee Choi are united by their embrace of work both playful and political. Don Mee Choi’s Freely Frayed grapples with the politics of distance and language in its exploration of anti-colonial logic and identity. Hannah Lavery’s Everything Everyday is a formally innovative poetic journal, where personal confession and public ritual converge.
Get TicketsPurple Poetry (Sat 14th)
4:15 am - 5:10 pm
Purple Poetry creates on-the-spot typewritten poems based on a brief conversation. This could be about absolutely anything: where is your heart right now, how has life been feeling lately? Award-winning poet Heather Rose combines counselling-informed listening with her lyrical poetry style to create a typewritten poem to treasure for only £10!
Roundtable With Fady Joudah
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
CANCELLED: Due to other commitments, Fady Joudah is no longer able to take part in this event.
Take part in this intimate online round table reading and discussion with Palestinian poet Fady Joudah, in conversation with poet and publisher Anthony Anaxagorou. Fady will be reading from his most recent collection […], a prize-winning collection which urgently speaks to Palestine’s daily and historic erasure.
Get TicketsFetches and Folklore
5:15 pm - 6:10 pm
Join us for a double bill showcasing two of the most exciting debuts from the past year. Playful and spirited, Kym Deyn and Colin Bramwell explore and undo binaries, drawing on the doppelgangers and trickster figures of folklore to do so.
Get TicketsPoetry Jam with Anoraq
6:15 pm - 7:15 pm
Expect the unexpected – as long as the unexpected includes poetry, music and plenty of improvisation. This year, our perennially popular poetry jam joins forces with spoken word band Anoraq. Come along with a poem you’ve always wanted to read with a backing band, or simply to listen and settle in for a night of musical fun.
Get TicketsPoetry Tasting Menu with Ella Risbridger
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Treat yourself with food writer and poet Ella Risbridger. With Ella’s best-selling debut cookbook described as “a manual for living and a declaration of hope”, there’s no better host for our inaugural full poetry tasting menu, where selected poems match your meal.
Includes a glass of fizz and speciality focaccia, followed by a two-course meal.
Get TicketsPush the Boat Out’s Saturday night gig with Anthony Joseph and band
7:30 pm - 10:30 pm
Push the Boat Out’s annual Saturday Night gig presents award-winning writer and musician Anthony Joseph and his band. At their only Scottish gig this year, enjoy a hypnotic fusion of spoken word, jazz, Afrobeat, funk and the rhythms of the Caribbean. With support from rapper, poet and musician, Bee Asha.
Get TicketsMaryville by Joelle Taylor
7:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Join Joelle Taylor for the Scottish Premiere of the staged reading of Maryville: a searing, poetic excavation of fifty years of lesbian counterculture that charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history. Directed by Neil Bartlett, with visuals from Sweatmother, Maryville explores the scars, hopes and potentialities of dyke identity and the queer underground.
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