Saturday 30 May, 20:30-21:45, Hay Festival, St. Mary’s Church, Hay-On-Wye. General admission: £16.
Join the 2024 RSL Jerwood Poets – Roseanne Watt, Scott McKendry, clare e. potter and Karen McCarthy Woolf – for a performance of collaborations co-conceived with musician, Kathryn Williams.
These poems amplify whispered stories and recover myths from each corner of the British Isles. They tune into unheard frequencies of language as they find new ways to navigate elegy, absence and joy.
Booking:
- 9th March – Hay Member+, Patrons, and Benefactors of the Festival can buy tickets
- 11th March – Hay Members and Priority Bookers can buy tickets from 12PM
- 14th Match – Booking opens to the general public from 12PM
Speakers
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. Her verse novel Top Doll was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Jhalak Prizes. She was a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar and writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and winner of the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). She has edited numerous literary anthologies, including Nature Matters: Vital Poems of the Global Majority (Faber, 2025). Her poetry has been translated into Swedish, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, produced as animation and dance; exhibited by Poems on the Underground across the London tube network and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament. She is currently writing a libretto for a new collaboration with BBC Radio 3.
Scott McKendry is from North Belfast. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. His pamphlet, Curfuffle (Lifeboat, 2019), was a Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice. In 2019, McKendry won a Patrick Kavanagh Award. In 2024 he was chosen by Paul Muldoon as Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Poet of Promise. His debut collection, GUB, is out now with Corsair (Little, Brown).
clare e. potter loves poetry in the woods by the ash tree. As a poetry therapy practice trainee she facilitates creative wellbeing workshops, motivated by the belief that poetry can be a force for personal and social change. She presents radio, with The Poet’s Poet nominated for a Celtic Media Award, and has directed a BBC documentary, The Wall and the Mirror, about her village barber, thereafter a group formed to save the miners’ institute. clare mentors other artists, has given a TedX talk, and won the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. She has translated for the National Poet of Wales, was a Hay Festival Writer at Work and is this year’s Royal Society of Literature/Jerwood Poetry Award winner for Cymru. Her Cymraeg pamphlet Nôl Iaith follows her new collection Healing the Pack. She was an ambassador for the Welsh language at Llif a European languages retreat with focus on ecology, climate emergency and culture.
Roseanne Watt is a writer and filmmaker from Shetland. Her dual-language debut collection, Moder Dy, was published by Polygon in May 2019 after receiving the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2018, and went on to receive an Eric Gregory and Somerset Maugham Award in 2020. She is the Scottish winner of the RSL Jerwood Award 2024.
Kathryn Williams is a Liverpool born singer-songwriter with seventeen albums under her belt, and has been nominated for the Mercury music prize, SAY award and AMA award. Her last solo album Night Drives entered the official folk album charts at #2. The label OLI celebrated her career thus far with a box set ‘Anthology’ of twenty CDs and two books strewn with her artwork .Her novel The Ormering Tide, published by wrecking ball press, debuted to critical acclaim, and was listed as a bestseller for the north of England in The Bookseller. She hosts her own popular podcast ‘Before the light goes out’, which appeared in the top ten best music podcasts by The Guardian. Kathryn tutors at Arvon and Moniack Mhor, and writes with many diverse artists around the world including Paul Weller, Chris Difford, Ed Harcourt, Beth Neillson Chapman, Polly Paulusma, Michele Stoddart and Withered Hand. She is the only female included in the top ten list of best Liverpool songwriters of all pop/ Her album with Withered Hand titled WILLSON WILLIAMS was nominated for a SAY award and an AMA award. Her fiftheenth solo album Mystery Park is out in autumn 2025.
Presented in partnership with Hay Festival. See the full programme of events for the 2026 festival here.
Funded by the Jerwood Foundation and Creative Scotland.
