Poetry Spotlight:
Zoe Brooks & Anna Saunders
with Julia Webb, Leo Boix, Lesley Sharpe
Wednesday 12 November, Zoom, 7pm
Tickets: £5/£3
Zoe Brooks and Anna Saunders will be well known to many who follow the contemporary poetry scene as the forces behind a festival that has been running since 2011. Described by The Guardian as ' A poetry party with a healthy dose of anarchy', Cheltenham Poetry Festival delivers an annual 10-day programme of live events each spring, and a year-round online programme of workshops and poetry lounges.
But they are more than just impresarios - they are compelling poets in their own right too. We welcome them to MK Lit Fest as they read from their latest and forthcoming collections, along with brief readings from a supporting cast of contemporary poetry excellence.
Meet the Poets
Zoe Brooks
Zoe Brooks has been widely published in print and online magazines. Zoe’s poems have appeared in a number of anthologies, including Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology (Butcher’s Dog) and Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry (Lamar University Press).
Her long poem Fool's Paradise won the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition award for best poetry ebook 2013. Her collection Owl Unbound was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing in October 2020 and Fool’s Paradise was published as a print book by Black Eyes Publishing in 2022. Her third collection, provisionally called Something In Nothing, will be published by Indigo Dreams in February 2026.
More about Zoe:
Anna Saunders
Anna Saunders is the author of eight books: Communion, Kissing the She Bear (Wild Conversations Press), Struck (Pindrop Press), Burne Jones and the Fox, Ghosting for Beginners, Feverfew, The Prohibition of Touch, and Eurydice in the Ruined House (all Indigo Dreams). Anna has been widely published in journals and holds four Arts Council Awards. She is the Founding Director of Cheltenham Poetry Festival. She has been described as ‘a poet who surely can do anything’ (The North), ‘a poet of quite remarkable gifts,’ ( Bernard O’Donoghue), and ‘a modern mythmaker’ (Paul Stephenson).
Fran Lock said of Eurydice in the Ruined House ‘this is a deft and generous work in which to delight’, and Samatar Elmi described it as ‘ a triumph of vision, craft, and execution’. The American poet Joseph Fasano said of her ‘Anna Saunders' poems reach back to the very origins of who we are, and, in their contact with the ancient things, they transform themselves into freshness, newness, life. Dripping with myth, they sing, they mourn, they celebrate. There is magic in these poems — not the superficial magic of illusion but the deep magic of being.’
More about Anna:
Julia Webb
Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer and artist from a working-class background. She has four poetry collections with Nine Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019), The Telling (2022) and Grey Time (2025). In 2011 she won the Poetry Society's Stanza competition and in 2018 she won the Battered Moons Poetry competition. She has had two poems highly commended in the Forward Prize (2016, 2022). Julia has taught creative writing for organisations such as Lapidus, MIND, Norfolk County Council, and The SAW Trust, and in 2016 she was writer in residence on Norwich market. In 2024 she was commissioned by The National Centre for writing and Living wage Foundation to write a poem for Living Wage Week. She currently runs real world and email poetry courses, and mentors writers. She is on the committee of Café Writers and is steering editor for Lighthouse – a journal for new writers. Julia lives in Norwich.
More about Julia:
photo (c) Naomi Woodis
Leo Boix
Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London, whose work spans continents, languages, and identities. His debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and named one of the Guardian’s top five poetry books of the year. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and praised by the Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Morning Star for its lyrical power and fearless engagement with queer, diasporic experience.
Boix is the editor and lead translator of the groundbreaking Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Poetry (Fourteen Publishing), and has introduced English-speaking audiences to major Latin American voices. His poems appear in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, World Literature Today, and in anthologies such as 100 Queer Poems (Vintage) and The Forward Book of Poetry.
A fellow of The Complete Works program, he co-directs Un Nuevo Sol, nurturing Latinx writers in the UK. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, Kew Gardens, and the National Poetry Library, earning prizes including the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize, and a PEN Award.
More about Leo:
Lesley Sharpe
Lesley Sharpe teaches in London. Commended in the National Poetry Competition 2024, and Highly Commended in both the Charles Causley and Katherine Bevis Prizes 2025, her poems, reviews and essays appear in several journals and anthologies, most recently Katherine Mansfield and London (EUP 2024), Aesthetica, Finished Creatures and Mslexia.
More about Lesley: