In this special episode, we share a recording of our live event at Norfolk and Norwich Festival in June 2024, celebrating our new anthology: Poems as Friends.

Michael Shaeffer is joined by contributors to the anthology Roy McFarlane and Hannah Jane Walker, to read a selection of the poems found within its pages, alongside the stories of the readers who have known them as friends.

We are incredibly grateful to the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and the National Centre for Writing for hosting us for this very special event - part of the City of Literature programme - and for all their passion and support for our work with poems as friends. City of Literature is a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by the National Centre for Writing.

We hope you enjoy listening in!

Poems as Friends: The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology is available now from all good bookshops in the UK and online. It is co-authored by Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer and published by Quercus Editions.

Hannah Jane Walker is an award-winning writer, performer and poet with a socially engaged practice. Her work deals with emotion, vulnerability and the human experience and has been praised for its humour, sincerity and poetic ambition. She published her first book Sensitive with Octopus Hachette and her poetry has been published by Nasty Little Press, Nine Arches Press and in anthologies with Penned in the Margins and Forest Fringe. Her plays are published by Oberon.

Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton - and more recently in Brighton. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence, and is currently the UK Canal Poet Laureate. He has three collections published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath (2016); The Healing Next Time (2018), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and Living By Troubled Waters (2022). In 2023, Roy McFarlane was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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