Danez Smith sits onstage, wearing a camo jacket.

View all events for category: Literature & poetry

Out-Spoken: October

Come along to our special Out-Spoken night as part of London Literature Festival, featuring a headline set from Danez Smith and more special guests.

Part of Out-Spoken

More details for Queen Elizabeth Hall

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For your visit

Out-Spoken moves to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for London Literature Festival, and with a bigger audience and a world-class lineup, it promises to be an outstanding evening of words and music.

Out-Spoken is London’s premier evening of poetry and live music. Each month we celebrate diversity in voice and performance with a stellar line up of the hottest UK poets alongside a line-up of world-class musicians.

This month’s edition features poetry from Jay Bernard, Danez Smith and Linton Kwesi Johnson, and music from Joshua Idehen and other special guests. As ever, the night is hosted by TS Eliot prize-winner, Joelle Taylor, with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield spinning the best in reggae, soul and R&B throughout the evening.

Jay Bernard is a writer and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores issues of queerness, race and archiving through a critical lens. Their short films, artwork and literary collections have been exhibited at film festivals and galleries UK wide, and they were the recipient of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award, and the 2017 Ted Hughes Award.

Joshua Idehen is a British-born Nigerian based in Sweden. A spoken word artist and musician, he has featured on Mercury Award-nominated albums Channel The Spirits and Your Queen Is A Reptile (by The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet, respectively) and the MOBO-winning Black Is The Future, by Sons of Kemet. His mixtape Learn To Swim was released in 2023 to critical acclaim, including a Manifest Award nomination. His poetry collection Songbook: Collected Works arrives in October via Bad Betty Press.

Linton Kwesi Johnson is a Jamaican-born reggae poet who came to the UK in 1963. Joining the Black Panthers while still at school, he is a life-long activist fighting for racial social justice. In 2002 he became the second living poet, and the only Black poet, to be published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. In 2023 he published Time Come, an anthology of prose written across his career. He has recorded a number of albums and toured the globe.

Danez Smith is the author of Homie (2020) and Don’t Call Us Dead (2018), which won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Four Quartets Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Bluff (2024). They live in Minneapolis.

Presented in partnership with Out-Spoken

Need to know

Age guidance

For ages 16+

Stage Sponsor

Access

This event is British Sign Language Interpreted (BSL). Interpretation is by Lorna Patterson and Pettra St Hilaire (subject to change).

To book tickets for BSL interpretation, email [email protected] or call us on 020 3879 9555.

You can join our free Access Scheme through your online Southbank Centre account or via email.
Find out more about our Access Scheme
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For your visit

This event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall Southbank Centre

The Queen Elizabeth Hall is open from 90 minutes before events start until they finish. It’s closed at all other times.

Queen Elizabeth Hall building at Southbank Centre

The Queen Elizabeth Hall is home to both our second-largest auditorium and the Purcell Room.

Getting here

Our address is Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX.

The nearest tube stations to us are Waterloo and Embankment; Waterloo is also the nearest train station. And more than 20 different London bus routes pass within 500 metres of our venues. More information on getting here by rail, road or river is available on our Getting here page.

We’re cash-free

Please note that we’re unable to accept cash payments across our venues.

We’re working hard to remove barriers, so that our facilities and events can be accessible to as many people as possible.

All help points, toilets, performance and exhibition spaces at the Southbank Centre are accessible to all, as are the cafes, bars and restaurants. We also have excellent public transport links with step-free access.

All information about booking wheelchair spaces, step-free access, blue badge parking, access maps and guides and other help available whilst you’re here, including details about our Access Scheme, can be found on our Access page.

From coffee to cocktails, filling favourites to fine dining, plus some of London’s best street food – it’s all here at the Southbank Centre.

Places to eat and drink whilst you’re here