Poet, producer and presenter, Jill Abram is autistic, has Jewish heritage and lives with fibromyalgia. She grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. Her poems have been published and performed widely. Jill’s debut pamphlet, Forgetting My Father, is published by Broken Sleep Books. jillabram.co.uk

Barbican Young Poet Katie O’Pray is a winner of the Ruth Weiss Foundation's Emerging Poets Prize and Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition. Their debut collection Apricot was published by Out-Spoken in 2022. 

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, and former Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and she was shortlisted for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Award. Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches).

Julia Blackburn’s recent books include The Wren (Hazel Press), descibed as “not quite prose, not quite poetry, but is an incisive closely lived collection of reflections hewn from  encounters and journals moving through ideas and seasons.” Time Song: Searching for Doggerland was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize.

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2014), with poems featured on radio and television as well as the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. Her seven collections include Over the Moon and her latest, Shadow Reader (Bloodaxe, 2024).

Kit Fan writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction. His third collection The Ink Cloud Reader was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. He reviews for The Guardian and the TLS. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Non-Executive Director of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).

The Hosepipe Band is an East Anglian ceilidh band whose line-up consists of Cara Brun on keyboards; Simon Haines on accordions, concertina and footbass; Nelson Surfquake on electric guitar and upright bass; and Val Woollard on flute, bagpipes, recorders, dulcimer and saxophone.

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A new collection is forthcoming in 2025. She is the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. 

Michael Laskey co-founded and directed the original Aldeburgh Poetry Festival through its first decade. He co-edited fifty issues of Smiths Knoll. His Garlic Press publishes mainly Suffolk poets.    T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted and twice PBS recommended, he has published six collections, most recently Between Ourselves (Smith/Doorstop, 2022).

Arji Manuelpillai is a poet and creative facilitator based in London. His debut pamphlet, Mutton Rolls (Out-Spoken Press, 2020) was followed by Improvised Explosive Device (Penned in the Margins, 2022), chosen as The Telegraph's Top Twenty poetry books and in The Guardian's best recent poetry section, securing a PBS selection and a Derek Walcott Prize shortlisting. 

Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and life writer. His novel The Last Weekend and poetry collection Shingle Street both explore the Suffolk coast. Last year he published a memoir, Two Sisters, and two poetry pamphlets, Skin & Blister and Never the Right Time.

Poets for the Planet - Claire Collison won the inaugural Women Poets’ Prize, 2018. Her debut pamphlet, Placebo, is published by Blueprint. clairecollison.com. Caroline Davies’ most recent book is Elements of Water (Green Bottle Press). She has an MA writing poetry from the Poetry School. Emma Woodford’s forthcoming publication Wingless I Watch is a Crimson Spine Competition winner (Hedgehog Press).

Jacob Sam-La Rose is a programme leader, facilitator and editor, currently researching poetic practice and generative text. He has served as poet-in-residence at Raffles Institution in Singapore, artistic director for the Spoken Word Education Programme at Goldsmiths UoL, and as a poetry professor at Guildhall School of Music & Drama. 

Paul Stephenson has published three pamphlets, and a full collection, Hard Drive (Carcanet, 2023 which was longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2024 and shortlisted for the Gay Poetry Lammy Award 2024. He is a university lecturer and researcher living between Cambridge and Brussels, and is on the Poetry in Aldeburgh committee. 

Stress Test - John Osborne writes scripts, poems and stories. His first book Radio Head was broadcast as a Radio 4 Book of the Week and he has had poetry published in The Guardian and The Rialto. His new show Norwich: A Love Story debuted in 2024.

Suffolk Poetry Society: Virginia Betts is a tutor, writer and actor. She has published a book of Gothic-Noir stories and two poetry collections. She also writes a monthly column for Felixstowe Magazine and tutors English. Col Farrell’s poems have appeared in the SPS magazine, 'Twelve Rivers' and in two Forward anthologies: one commemorating the end of the Great War, the other a compendium of poetic forms.

Suffolk Poetry Society: Fran Reader’s poems have featured in Poetry on the Lake anthology 2021 and recent George Crabbe Competition anthologies. She is editor of the Suffolk Poetry Society magazine Twelve Rivers and Chair of the SPS. Sarah Sibley’s debut pamphlet The Withering Room was published by Green Bottle in 2015 and was the London Review Bookshop blog’s pamphlet of the year.

Suffolk Poetry Society Walk: Sue Mobbs’ poetry is often influenced by landscape and nature. In 2018 she won a prize in the Rialto Nature and Place Competition and has had poems published by Suffolk Poetry Society. Sue Wallace-Shaddad is Secretary of SPS and organises readings, runs workshops, writes reviews and blogs. Her third pamphlet, Once There Was Colour, is published by Palewell.

Sean Wai Keung is a poet, performer and food writer with a particular focus on migration, community and cooking. His published work includes you are mistaken and Sikfan Glaschu (Verve Poetry Press). He is Poetry Reviews editor of Gutter magazine and poetry editor of Middleground magazine, a biannual magazine dedicated to writers from mixed race backgrounds. 

Jemilea Wisdom-Baako is a British-Jamaican poet and founder of Writerz and Scribez CIC. A London Writers Award recipient, she was shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Women's Poetry Prize and The Bridport Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Magma, Poetry Wales and other publications. Wisdom-Baako won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize for her debut Grey Coats and Nokia Phones.  

Eric Yip is a poet from Hong Kong. He won the 2021 National Poetry Competition and was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Guardian, Oxford Poetry, and The Poetry Review. His debut pamphlet is Exposure (ignitionpress, 2024).

Barbican Young Poet Esme Allman works across the disciplines of poetry and literature, theatre, movement, film, and has been commissioned to produce poetry for NHS Arts and Heritage, Poetry V Colonialism, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the BBC. Her collection Sweet Bone Girl will be published by Broken Sleep Books in March 2025.

Barbican Young Poet  Zahrah Sheikh is a British Pakistani poet from Ilford. Her writing mainly explores prayer, the self, the weight of an action and silence. She has produced poetry, exhibitions and workshops for St Paul's Cathedral, the Horniman Museum and The Dead [Women] Poets' Society.

Caroline Bird won the Forward Prize for best collection in 2020 with The Air Year (Carcanet) and has been shortlisted for a number of prizes including the T.S. Eliot, the Costa, the Ted Hughes Award and the Polari Prize. Her most recent book is Ambush at Still Lake. She won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023.

Helen Dangerfield is the Director of Essex and Suffolk Rivers Trust, a charity set up to conserve, protect and rehabilitate the rivers and estuaries of Essex and Suffolk. For the last 12 years Helen has worked in the East of England and is getting to know the watery landscape which supports us all. Alongside her interest in the natural world, Helen is a lover of poetry and sees the arts as essential to engaging people with nature.

Kat Dixon (she/her) is a queer writer living in London. Her poetry has appeared in various publications, including The Rialto, Butcher’s Dog, Queerlings, Impossible Archetype, Magma, fourteenpoems, Spectrum Anthology, Re:Creation Anthology and others. Her debut pamphlet eat the glitter is recently published with Broken Sleep Books.

Emily Hasler’s RSL Ondaatje Prize-longlisted second collection Local Interest (Pavilion Poetry, 2023) maps the friable and slippery landscapes of Suffolk and Essex. Her critically-acclaimed first collection, The Built Environment, was published in 2018. She has been an Early Career Resident at Cove Park, a Hawthornden Fellow and received an Eric Gregory Award. 

Matt Howard is manager of the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. His first collection, Gall,

(The Rialto, 2018) was winner of the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize in 2019, and won Best First Collection in the inaugural Laurel Prize 2020. His second collection, Broadlands, is published by Bloodaxe.

Mimi Khalvati’s nine collections include The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and, most recently, Afterwardness (Carcanet, 2019). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the recipient of The King’s Gold Medal for Poetry 2023. Her Collected Poems is due from Carcanet in November.

Jane Lovell is a prize-winning poet whose focus is our relationship with the Earth and its wildlife. Her work 'fizzes with acute visual detail, offering a dizzying sense of perspective' (Helen Mort) and she has won the Ginkgo and Rialto Nature & Place prizes. Her latest collection is On Earth, as it is, published by Hazel Press. 

Fiona Moore's first full collection The Distal Point (HappenStance, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 T. S. Eliot and Seamus Heaney Prizes. She is on the board of Magma and the Poetry in Aldeburgh committee. Her book-length poem Okapi is just out from Blue Diode Press.

Poets for the Planet - Julian Bishop’s first collection of eco poems, We Saw It All Happen was published in 2023 by Fly On The Wall Press. A former environment journalist turned poet, he lives in Herts. Susie Campbell makes visual, sound and textile poetry as well as text poetry, and her latest poetry publications are Tenter (2020), Enclosures (2021) and The Sleeping Place (2023). 

Over forty years ago, artist Simon Read brought a seagoing barge to the Suffolk Coast where he has lived ever since. From experience gained on a range of environmental projects, he has sought ways of pursuing this on a local level working with his immediate community, academically, by proposing interdisciplinary collaborations and as a studio-based artist.

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. She is the author of nine plays, five poetry pamphlets and five full collections, including All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and most recently, Velvel’s Violin (Nine Arches Press, 2023) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and Radio 4 Extra Poetry Book of the Month. She is a founder of Poets for the Planet and on the Poetry in Aldeburgh committee. 

Stress Test - Joe Dunthorne's first novel, Submarine, was translated into 20 languages and made into a film. His debut poetry collection, O Positive, was published in 2019 (Faber & Faber). Ella Frears’ debut collection Shine, Darling was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize. Her latest book Goodlord is shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Sky Arts Breakthrough Award. 

Suffolk Poetry Society Showcase: James Alexander is a writer and performer of poetry. He was the first poet published by the Soor Ploom Press and his poems have been included in Hedgehog Poetry Press and Orchard Lea Books. Philip Baker has been published in magazines and anthologies including On a Knife Edge, published by Suffolk Poetry Society and the Lettering Arts Trust. In 2022 he was longlisted for the International Erbacce Prize and won the George Crabbe Poetry Prize.

Suffolk Poetry Society: Pat Jourdan trained as an artist at Liverpool College of Art. She is published in Orbis, Ink and George Crabbe Poetry. Her seventh poetry collection Citizeness and fifth novel Ultramarine are recently published. Lynne Nesbit has published three collections, Looking for Lamp-Posts (DPdotCom), In The Wake Of Dying (Beccles Books) and most recently, The Ecstasy of Nature The Nature of Ecstasy (Eye Wild Books). 

Suffolk Poetry Society: Nicola Warwick has won the George Crabbe Poetry Competition twice. Her pamphlet, Naming the Land (Maytree Press), was shortlisted for the 2023 New Angle Prize and her V. Press pamphlet The Human Portion won the Poetry Category in the 2023 East Anglian Book Awards.

Hungarian-born George Szirtes’ twelfth book of poems, Reel (2004), won the T.S. Eliot Prize for which he has been twice shortlisted since. His latest is Fresh Out of the Sky (Bloodaxe, 2021). His memoir The Photographer at Sixteen was awarded the James Tait Black Prize in 2020.

Christine Webb, one of two daughters of a working-class Midlands family, has spent her working life in education, and continues to share her love of poetry by running a monthly reading group at her local library. Her collections After Babel and Catching Your Breath are published by Cinnamon Press. 

Jennifer Wong (she/her) is a writer, poet and translator (Chinese/English). She is the author of three collections and a pamphlet including  Letters Home (Nine Arches Press 2020). She co-edited State of Play: Poets of East and Southeast Asian Heritage in Conversation (Outspoken Press, 2023). Her pamphlet with Verve, Time difference, was published in October 2024.

Tamar Yoseloff’s seventh collection, Belief Systems (Nine Arches, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a Radio 4 Poetry Extra Book of the Month for September 2024. She is a freelance lecturer in creative writing and won a Cholmondeley Award in 2023. She is the Chair of Poetry in Aldeburgh.