Poetry at The Woodman with BCU: William Wootten, Martin Yates, Suna Afshan

Join us for a FREE night of poetry, brought to you by the Department of English and Media at Birmingham City University, upstairs at the legendary pub, The Woodman!

We are delighted to welcome William Wootten, Martin Kennedy Yates and Suna Afshan to read from their work.

William Wootten is the author of the poetry collections Landline (Worple 2025) and You Have a Visitor (Worple 2016) and the critical study The Alvarez Generation: Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Peter Porter (Liverpool University Press, 2015), as well as being the editor of Reading Walter de la Mare (Faber 2021). He lives in London and is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol.

Martin Kennedy Yates was born on Merseyside and raised in the Black Country where he currently lives and works. His poems have been published in The Rialto, Stand, Magma, Poetry Wales, Butcher’s Dog, Anthropocene, The Storms, Finished Creatures, The Alchemy Spoon and elsewhere. He is the winner of The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition 2024 for his debut collection, This Wilderness and Other Concerns. He is an alumnus of the MA Creative Writing programme at Birmingham City University.

Suna Afshan is a poet, translator, and editor from the West Midlands. Her most recent work is Tape Letters: a Translation into Poetry, commissioned and published by Modus Arts in 2023. Among other publications, her work has appeared notably in The Dark Horse, Modern Poetry in Translation, The London Magazine, Stand, Magma, and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She is an alumna of the MA Creative Writing at Birmingham City University.

This event will be hosted by Professor Gregory Leadbetter, Professor of Poetry and Director of the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing at Birmingham City University. His new book of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025).

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