Global Crip Poetry Celebration

Join us for a special celebration of poetry, featuring readings and discussion from new anthology Versus Versus, alongside exclusive video footage from international contributors.

The poems in the anthology bear witness to conflict, disinformation and discrimination, as well as celebrating the importance of creativity, solidarity and empathy at a time when discussions of these topics are more urgent than ever.

This event features specially pre-recorded video from a selection of the anthology’s contributors, established and emerging, historical and contemporary. We hear poems by Levent Beskardes, Khairani Barokka, Hàn Mặc Tử, Andy Jackson, Lateef McLeod, Chisom Okafor and GN Saibaba.

Versus Versus is supported by the Royal Society of Literature via their Literature Matters Award.

Rachael Boast is a British writer, editor and disability advocate, navigating Ichthyosis and related conditions. She has published four collections of poetry with Picador, most recently, Hotel Raphael (2021).

Lisa Kelly is a poet, editor and educator based in London. She has single-sided deafness and is half Danish. Her second collection, The House of the Interpreter (Carcanet), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Poet, fabulist and librettist Karthika Naïr was born with RDEB inversa, a rare, chronic disorder of the skin and mucous membranes. Her works include the play Beneath the Music and the award-winning Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata.

Daniel Sluman is a poet and disability rights activist. He co-edited the first major UK disability poetry anthology, Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back, and has published three poetry collections with Nine Arches Press.