An examination of contemporary issues in poetry. Featuring poets Jacqueline Saphra, Kate Fox and Arji Manuelpillai.

Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright, teacher and activist. Collections include All My Mad Mothers, shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize, Dad, Remember You are Dead and One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets, A Bargain with the Light: Poems after Lee Miller and Veritas: Poems after Artemisia (2020)

Kate Fox is a poet, performer, writer and broadcaster. Collections include We Are Not Stone, Fox Populi and Chronotopia. She won the Andrew Waterhouse Award for poetry from Writing North in 2006. She has been Poet in Residence for the Great North Run, Glastonbury Festival and Radio 4’s Saturday Live.

Arji Manuelpillai is a poet, performer and creative facilitator. He has been shortlisted for the Oxford Prize, the Live Canon Prize, the National Poetry Prize and the Winchester Prize and was runner-up in the Robert Graves Prize. His debut pamphlet was Mutton Rolls and his new book is Improvised Explosive Device

Off the Shelf, delivered by the University of Sheffield, has grown into one of the largest literary festivals in the UK, attracting some of the best-known names in literature and media to Sheffield each year. The festival programme is wide ranging and offers events featuring some of the best names in fiction and nonfiction, poetry, politics, journalism, music, history and science.