Date/Time: Thursday 9 November 2023, 7pm to 8pm

Venue: Culture Lab, Newcastle University

The James Berry Poetry Prize is the UK’s first poetry prize offering both expert mentoring and book publication for young or emerging poets of colour. Organised by NCLA with Bloodaxe Books, and supported by special funding from Arts Council England, the prize was launched in April 2021. 

In her debut collection Hot Sauce Kaycee Hill frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape. Reflecting on her life and those in it, as well as first-times, underground scenes and the female body, she looks towards what is unflinchingly personal, and also outwards: towards family and strangers, nature and place, and a world that shapeshifts before us. Kaycee Hill is a poet and digital mixed media artist. Now based in Southampton, she was born in Winchester and grew up in a working-class, mixed-heritage household – British and Caribbean – in Andover.

Marjorie Lotfi’s debut collection The Wrong Person to Ask is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.

Neil Astley is the founder of Bloodaxe Books.

Theresa Muñoz is the Director of Newcastle Poetry Festival.

Free event, and all welcome.

Culture Lab is building number 7 on Newcastle University's map of the campus