Ben Brown previews his next book at an intimate evening at LAF for this year’s festival, featuring original artwork by Bill Hammond and opening set by Dominic Hoey.

This Imperfect Light spans Browns work from 1994 to 2025 and is published by Dead Bird Books. New poems, old stories, last chance saloons and unexpected consequences with Lyttelton resonating throughout.

This evening will explore his creative friendship with Bill Hammond, working with his daughter, making it and losing it in Lyttelton, and the bigger questions underneath it all. Informal but structured, the audience is invited into the conversation. Hammond's original artwork projected throughout.

"The poem is a brief conversation with the late Bill Hammond. In 2011 just a few weeks before the killer February EQ, I got cheeky at the Lava Bar one weekday night when he was taking a break from his paints n brushes. Shouted him a pinot noir - a good one - and asked him if he’d maybe consider illustrating a book of poems one day . . .So it’s 2013 on a cold day going nowhere else and he just walks up to me on London Street right outside the library, slaps a plain brown A4 sized paper bag hard and flat to my chest and says, ‘I got something for you. Do what you fuckin like with them... ‘ then he hit up LCC for a coffee..."

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