Thursday 6th November

LAUNCH -> Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Masłowska

With readings by Sophie Collins, Vik Shirley & Agata Masłowska

Part lullaby, part insurrection, Agata Masłowska’s poetry is powered by the drive to understand life at its deepest level, pre-human and beyond borders. To explode language, grasping what we can know in our bones and roots, and to live according to that knowing. Lyrically sublime, playfully provocative, the poems in Woman : Plant : Language disrupt form to challenge rampant authority, layering the lived experiences of womanhood, migration and war between the ripple of bryophytes, the songs of the soil, the fading call of endangered species. Masłowska’s work is myceliumesque, linking arms with Etel Adnan, Jane Hirshfield, Nan Shepherd, Anna Tsing and more, to flourish within a crystalline network of thinkers. An unforgettable debut, calling us back to the unspeakable world.

Sophie Collins grew up in Bergen, North Holland. She is the author of the book-length essay small white monkeys (Book Works, 2016) and the poetry collection Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber, 2018), which won the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize for a distinctive first collection. She is the English-language translator of Dutch poet laureate Lieke Marsman’s poetry and prose. An excerpt from Private View, her forthcoming first novel, was published in Granta 168: Significant Other last year.

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer and editor from Bristol living in Edinburgh. Her most recent book is Some Deer (Broken Sleep, 2024) and her first was Corpses (Sublunary Editions, 2020). Her third photo poetry collection, Personal Digitalia, was selected for the inaugural PhotoWorks P5 Photo Poetry Series and will be published Autumn, 2025. Her work has appeared in Poetry London, Magma, PN Review, The Rialto and Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Vik co-edits Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius and has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry from the University of Birmingham.

Agata Masłowska was born in Poland and lives in Scotland. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various magazines and journals. She is the recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Hawthornden Writing Fellowship. Her first poetry collection “Woman : Plant : Language” was published by Bad Betty Press in September 2025.

Published by Bad Betty Press

Thursday 13th November

READING -> Sean Roy Parker, Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf & Carle Gent

Join us for the final leg of Roy's year long book tour in support of his latest publication stewarding, published by Monitor Books.

Carle Gent is an artist from Bexhill-on-sea. She recently convened the Study Day on Biological Exuberance at Hospitalfield, Arbroath - a weekend of dance, talks, video, sound and performance looking at gay and trans animal life. They have also recently started a practice-based DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art asking how artmaking can meaningfully assist us in recognising the queer and internal lives of non-human animals. She has recently exhibited her sculptures, songs, vehicles and printouts at SQIFF, Glasgow Women's Library, Generator Projects, Pulsie, Matt's Gallery, Badischer Kunstverein, the De La Warr Pavilion, ICA, Somerset House, Goldsmiths CCA, Wysing Arts Centre, Jupiter Woods and the Museum of English Rural Life. Their pamphlet The Balls of Alban was published by Monitor Books in 2022.

Adam Nasser Benmakhlouf is a writer and artist in Scotland. For several years, they’ve been writing poetically about collective experimentation in training their body toward new horizons of queer and class liberation. They’re asking, “what ethical necessity is there to strain beyond personal capacity?” from their position of being working class, nonbinary, mixed race and queer. Adam is a Lecturer in Fine Art in the University of Edinburgh. They are currently finalising their practice-based PhD forming writerly responses to the invisible labour of facilitation and workshopping in contemporary art. This project is supervised principally by Professor Maria Fusco, with Dr Johanna Linsley and the Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) Beth Bates, fully funded by the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities, hosted jointly by Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, the University of Dundee and DCA.

Sean Roy Parker is an artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines with many collaborators in many places. He works exclusively from an eco-critical position, usually illustrating expanded material lifecycles, developing interspecies intimacy and teaching low-tech food preservation. He is a former student of School of the Damned, and currently is a Guest Mentor on The Gramounce Food/Art MA. Until its closure, Roy was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-Steiner School building in Derbyshire, East Midlands. In 2024, he received an Axis Fellowship and a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Artist Award, and his debut collection 'stewarding' was published by Monitor Books, London. He has recently completed artist commissions for Original Projects (Great Yarmouth), Audra Festival (Kaunas, Lithuania), and Three Rivers Bexley (London).