Writing Poetry about Place
Poetry Writing Workshop
with Helen Bowell

Tuesday 19 August 2025, 6.00pm - 8.00pm

8 Sunset Walk, centre:mk,
Milton Keynes MK9 3ES

Free event for people aged 16+
(places limited: pre-booking required)

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‘Helen Bowell’s The Barman is as funny and good as it is precise, at home in the interstices between cultures and TV channels, chips and chip grease, romance and boredom.’ - Will Harris

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As part of our new project, Raising Voices, we’re running three workshops in centre:mk this summer for anyone aged 16+ to write about the city.

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In this workshop, poet Helen Bowell will lead you through a number of writing activities to help you write poems about places in Milton Keynes. You’ll think about the distant and not-so-distant histories of the places you walk past every day, consider your place in the city, and find poetry in the most unexpected places.

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This two hour workshop will include writing exercises and prompts, and you will have opportunities after the event to submit writing that it has inspired to MK Lit Fest's Raising Voices Project, which is developing an online interactive audio-visual map of people's responses to and relationships with particular locations across our home city. Follow the link below to read more, download a free booklet, find out about our other in-person and online workshops, and discover how to submit your own writing.​​

About Helen Bowell
Helen Bowell is a poet, producer and editor. Her debut pamphlet The Barman (Bad Betty Press, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her poems, reviews and translations have been published in bath magg, Poetry London, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. She co-directs Dead [Women] Poets Society, which resurrects women poets through events and online. Helen ran Bi+ Lines, a project for bi+ poets, and edited the first anthology of bi+ poets (fourteen poems, 2023). She produced the Poetry Translation Centre's 20th birthday programme of events in 2024.

More about Helen: