specialising in live events & writer development
We’re delighted to be returning to Barnsley Book Festival for the second year running, with this breathtakingly good showcase event on Monday 2 March 2026. The event stars Salena Godden and Toria Garbutt, and also features an open mic section hosted by Matt Abbott.
You can reserve your FREE tickets here and the event is scheduled to run from 6-8pm.
Below are some highlights from our 2025 event, starring Joelle Taylor and Molly Naylor!
We’re buzzing to welcome Bad Betty back to Hyde Park Book Club on Monday 24 November! For the fourth year running, we’re showcasing three poets from BB’s roster alongside a Leeds-based feature.
Our feature poets are Antosh Wojcik, Zakariye, Francis-Xavier Mukiibi, and Maria Ferguson. Tickets are available here for £8/6!
We’re buzzing to be back at Leeds Lit Fest again this year, with this special ‘Poetry, Yorkshire & Beyond‘ event at Hyde Park Book Club on Wednesday 18 June.
Highly acclaimed Yorkshire-based writers Andrew McMillan and Maria Ferguson will be in conversation with poet Matt Abbott. They’ll also give 20-minute readings as part of the event.
Tickets are available here for £10.
We’re delighted to have programmed two events as part of this year’s Barnsley Book Festival. There’s a brilliant range of performances, workshops, and events taking place across Barnsley in late February and early March. Be sure to check them out ASAP as some have already sold out.
Firstly, we’re hosting a poetry workshop with Toria Garbutt on Monday 24 February. The workshop is targeted at poets aged 18-25 and is open to writers of all abilities and levels of experience.
Secondly, there’s a showcase event on Monday 3 March. This offers workshop participants the chance to read alongside acclaimed poets Joelle Taylor and Molly Naylor!
Both events take place at The Lightbox venue in Barnsley town centre. They’re also completely free of charge! This offers the perfect opportunity for people who are curious about poetry but not quite sure what to expect.
2024 saw the Roundhouse Poetry Slam regional heats visit Leeds for the very first time. And we’re buzzing about the fact that they couldn’t get enough! Roundhouse are partnering with LIVEwire Poetry once again to deliver your 2025 regional heats.
Last year saw our Leeds heat winner Bradley Taylor win the Roundhouse Poetry Slam outright. Zara Sehar, also from the Leeds heat, finished in 3rd place. So, clearly we have something magic going on!
We’re at Hyde Park Book Club on Friday 7 March and tickets are available here for £5 plus booking fee.
We’ve partnered up with Leeds Libraries and Wrongsemble to produce the first-ever Leeds Storytelling Festival! The festival takes place throughout the city from 14 February until 8 March.
Events include author readings, theatre performances, costume-making workshops, and bespoke poetry writing. The full programme is on sale here.
LIVEwire highlights include:
You can also follow the festival over on Instagram!
Hi everybody – I hope you’re well. I thought it’d be good to post a little update. Things have been pretty quiet from LIVEwire HQ of late…
Firstly, we’ve recently had a second successive bid rejected by Arts Council England. This obviously scuppered our plans for the rest of 2024. It also means that we no longer have paid support in the form of an Admin & Social Assistant. So, we need to mull things over and figure out what 2025 will look like.
Secondly, for the time being, we’ve decided to remove all paid tiers from our Patreon page. Due to several factors, we haven’t managed to sustain the level of content that we originally intended to. We do aim to restart it at some point, though!
Thirdly, we’re committing to keep the Instagram submissions going. They’re proving very popular, which is great to see. Check out the submissions page, and also the work published to our feed.
Finally, we’d just like to say a huge thank you to everybody who’s supported this new ‘era’. It was a significant step to evolve from Nymphs & Thugs back in February. We’ve produced some work that we’re immensely proud of, and hopefully laid the foundations for plenty more.
Thankfully, there’s a load of awesome poetry-related content being produced around the UK at the moment. So, we’re happy to sit back and enjoy that whilst we formulate our plans behind the scenes.
Take care of yourselves, and keep supporting poetry where you can!
All the best,
Matt and the LIVEwire team.
Now that the dust has settled in our maiden project, we’re over the moon to announce that Salena Godden FRSL is now an official patron of LIVEwire Poetry.
When we signed to Salena to Nymphs & Thugs in late 2016, it was the catalyst that saw us grow from being a small Yorkshire outfit to a nationally recognised organisation with global reach.
To have Salena has an official patron for LIVEwire Poetry is a huge endorsement for us and underlines our intent to become firmly established on the UK’s thriving spoken word poetry scene.
Here’s Salena’s statement:
I am honoured and excited to be invited to be official patron of LIVEwire Poetry. There is a thriving, vibrant, vital and lively poetry scene in the UK and organisations like LIVEwire nourish and feed the roots of it all. I enjoy LIVEwire tours and events and the myriad of incredible poets it attracts at all stages of their careers, from bold new voices to the more established well-known names, both on stage and in the audiences. It’s been a few years now since I produced my LIVEwire album with Matt Abbott and Nymphs & Thugs. We made that album to capture some of the magic and essence of live poetry, sharing the buzz of sharing poetry, the connections found and made. LIVEwire Poetry is all of that and more with nationwide live events and workshops, I look forward to watching this grow and seeing more poets arrive, evolve and blossom. Thank you.
Thank you to everybody who has supported us in this new era. It was a terrifying prospect to completely rebrand back in February, but from where we’re sitting, it couldn’t have gone any smoother.
Our writer development strand is something that we’re passionate about developing. And as part of that, we want to create pathways and recognition for writers at all stages of their journey. Which is why we’re committing to publishing a zine for every one of our workshop series.
This first zine features work submitted by some of the participants from our Spring/Summer 2024 workshop series, alongside some of the facilitators. It’s printed on 150gsm recycled paper (32pp) and is available here for £2.50 plus P+P, with an option for people to pay more if they choose to.
Huge thanks to Eamonn Dalton for coming on board with the typesetting, design, and layout. Eamonn has designed all of our LIVEwire Poetry graphics since the rebrand in February and we love this final piece to the jigsaw.
Thank you as well to all of our participants and facilitators for submitting their work. We’re extremely proud of it and hope that the participants will be, too!
It doesn’t seem like two minutes since we were putting this together, but after a dozen fantastic sessions, our first ever poetry workshop series has now come to a close.
Firstly, we’d like to say a huge thanks to our venues (Theatre Shop in Clevedon, Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery, and the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield).
We’d also like to thank our wonderful facilitators: Danny Carlo (aka Craft-D), Oliver James Lomax, Simone Yasmin, Josie Alford, Louise Fazackerley, Kim Moore, Saili Katebe, Ruth Awolola, Toria Garbutt, Talia Randall, Raymond Antrobus, and Cecilia Knapp.
Our fantastic participants, of course, who supported our project and trusted us with their creativity. And finally, to Arts Council England for making this possible through their National Lottery Project Fund. Fingers crossed, we’ll return with a second series later this year. Writer development is something that we feel passionately about and we’re excited to have been able to begin this journey.
LIVEwire Poetry 