Date/Time: Thursday 8 December 2022, 7pm to 8.15pm

Venue: The Common Room (formerly The Mining Institute), Neville Hall, Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne

Join award winning poets Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen in conversation with Maxïmo Park’s Paul Smith. Michael will be reading from his new book Boy Friends and Hollie from Slug.

Expect strong language and adult content.

The café bar at The Common Room is open before the event – come earlier to grab a drink and browse the book stall!  

‘Utterly fearless: [Hollie's is] an essential voice for our times’ Musa Okwonga

‘[Michael is] a master of words. He plays them like music.’ Kae Tempest

Hollie McNish is a poet and author based between Glasgow and Cambridge. She won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for her poetic parenting memoir – Nobody Told Me – of which The Scotsman stated ‘The World Needs this Book’. She has published four further collections of poetry Papers, Cherry Pie, Plum and her most recent poetic memoir Slug…and other things I’ve been told to hate, which is a Sunday Times Bestseller. With fellow poet Sabrina Mahfouz, she co-wrote Offside, a play relating the history of UK women’s football, and has just completed a re-imagining of Sophocles’ Greek Tragedy Antigone, published in October 2021 with Hachette. Her poetry has been translated into German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Japanese and French. She is a patron of Baby Milk Action. 

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet, author, scribbler and stitcher. He’s produced two acclaimed collections of poetry with a third slated for release in 2023. His poetic prose debut, Boy Friends, was published by Faber & Faber in 2022 in both the UK and North America, described by The Sunday Times as 'enthralling and written with enough electricity that it seems to jolt off the page.' He won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, the John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award, and was a finalist for the 2018 ‘Writer of the Year’ at The Herald Scottish Culture Awards. With work anthologised by the likes of Pan MacMillan and Canongate Books, his writing has attracted plaudits from Irvine Welsh, Jackie Kay, Stephen Fry, Shirley Manson, Kae Tempest, Charlotte Church and more. Pedersen also co-founded the infamous Neu! Reekie! literary production house.

Paul Smith is a Newcastle-based musician best known as the singer for the British alternative rock group Maxïmo Park, who released their debut album on Warp Records in 2005. Smith continues to perform and record with the band, who released their seventh album ‘Nature Always Wins’ last year, reaching #2 in the Pop Charts. He released his debut solo album, ‘Margins’, in 2010, alongside ‘Thinking In Pictures’, a book of Polaroid photographs. He’s also collaborated with Field Music’s Peter Brewis (on the 2014 album, ‘Frozen By Sight’), poet Lavinia Greenlaw, and Tricky. His latest collaboration, an album with Rachel Unthank, will arrive in the New Year. Pertinently, given the literary nature of this event, he has also hosted The Penguin Podcast.

Free event, and all very welcome.