Poetry Reading

Join us for a poetry evening with three contemporary poets: expect poetry, a panel discussion, and some time with a Q&A and signings at the end.

Ken Evans's second collection from Salt, 'A Full-on Basso Profundo' was published in 2025. He has won the Kent & Sussex, Leeds Peace and Creative Manchester prizes, and was runner-up in the Daily Telegraph poetry competition (2026) and the AUB (2024). Ken's poems appear in Magma, Acumen, Orbis, Poetry Scotland, Under the Radar, and Interpreter's House. Contributions to anthologies include Broken Sleep's Masculinity anthology and Write Out Loud's 20th anniversary edition.

Emma Simon published her first collection, Shapeshifting for Beginners with Salt in 2023. She has two previous pamphlets, The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020) and Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017). Emma has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and is a winner of a number of poetry competitions, incuding the Ver Poets, YorkMix, Live Canon and Prole Laureate competitions. She is a member of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival commitee, and attends and runs a number of poetry workshops. 

Claire Booker's poems have appeared widely in such publications as Agenda, Magma, The Morning Star, Mslexia, The Dark Horse and The Spectator. She's been longlisted in the National Poetry Prize, and is a five-times winner in The Poetry Society’s Members Poems Competition. In 2019, she travelled to Bangladesh as a guest poet at Dhaka's International Writers Festival and received a Kathak Literary Award. Her latest collection, Pedestrian in the Multiverse (Waterloo Press), follows A Pocketful of Chalk (Arachne Press) and two pamphlets, The Bone That Sang (Indigo Dreams) and Later There Will Be Postcards (Green Bottle Press).J

We apologise for the inconvenience but our bookshop is currently not wheelchair accessible. The toilet is located on the ground floor. The event space is located at the top of a staircase (17 steps).

Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more details to plan your visit ahead. Email is: salomee@kemptownbookshop.co.uk