This event features the two winners of the James Berry poetry prize 2023, Kaycee Hill and Marjorie Lotfi in conversation with Neil Astley, the founder of Bloodaxe Books, and Theresa Muñoz, the Director of Newcastle Poetry Festival. 

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. In her debut collection Hot Sauce she frankly explores coming of age as a woman – and the intricacies of connection and memory – against an urban-pastoral landscape. 

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.

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.

This event took place on the 9th of November 2023 in Culture Lab.