Join NCLA and the Poetry Book Society to celebrate their Spring 2025 Selections, toast the new PBS Selector – award-winning writer Yomi Sode – and launch Strange Beach by Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola – the very first title in Fitzcarraldo’s new poetry series. Poet and choreographer Seun explores themes of queer Black masculinity, death, family and love in this deft and philosophical debut. Impassioned, insightful and electric, Yomi Sode’s Manorism delves into Black British lives, art, belonging and inheritance. In this profound and moving book he asks: what does it mean to find oneself between worlds? Who is, and isn’t, allowed to be more than their origins? What do we owe ourselves? Don’t miss this life-affirming evening with two rising poetry stars.

Yomi Sode is an award-winning Nigerian British writer. He is a recipient of the 2019 Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship, shortlisted for The Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2021, and Arts Foundation Awards 2024. Yomi’s debut collection Manorism (Penguin) was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize, The Rathbones Folio Prize and was adapted for stage at the Southbank Centre.

Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. He has been published by the Guardian, The Poetry Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph and elsewhere. The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He lectures in dance at the Kingston School of Art and is a member of the inaugural Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells.

Sinéad Morrisey is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

www.poetrybooks.co.uk.

This event took place on the 27th of February 2025 in the Culture Lab.