LIVEwire Poetry

We return to the North Somerset coast for another jaw-droppingly good night at Weston-super-Mare’s Front Room! With a headline slot from Salena Godden plus feature slots from Malaika Kegode and Jonny Fluffypunk, you’re in for a real treat.

Tickets are Pay As You Feel (suggested £12) and are available here.

Salena Godden

Salena Godden is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize.

Salena’s work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize, and has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film. Her poem Pessimism is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Her brand-new poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury is available here on Canongate Books.

Malaika Kegode

Malaika Kegode is an award-winning writer and performer based in Bristol. Beginning her arts career as a performance poet in 2014, Malaika has since developed her practice to encompass theatre, radio, and film writing. Her autobiographical gig-theatre show Outlier debuted on Bristol Old Vic’s main stage in 2021.

Malaika’s narrative work has also been featured on BBC Radio 4, and her poetry collections Requite and Thalassic are published by Burning Eye Books.

Jonny Fluffypunk

Jonny Fluffypunk is an economic refugee from the Home Counties. He began his ‘career’ spitting vicious political verse between bands at punk gigs until cured by a West Country shaman. Now he ‘does’ poetry that deafly fuses bittersweet autobiography, political disillusionment, and surreal whimsy, in an act which has established him as a firm favourite at festivals, arts centres, and housing benefit offices up and down the country.