Thursday 6th November

LAUNCH: Woman : Plant : Language by Agata Masłowska

With readings by Juana Adcock, 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.

Juana Adcock is a poet, translator and editor writing in both English and Spanish. She is the author of five poetry collections, including I Sugar the Bones (Out-Spoken Press, 2024), which is shortlisted for the 2025 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She is co-editor of the anthology Temporary Archives: Poetry by women of Latin America (Arc, 2022) and has translated Laura Wittner’s Translation of the Route (Bloodaxe/PTC, 2024) and Hubert Matiuwaa’s The Dogs Dreamt, both of which received PEN Translates awards. She regularly performs at literary festivals across Europe, Asia and Latin America.

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