The Poetry Exchange

94. Poems as Friends at Norfolk & Norwich Festival

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Episode notes

In this special episode, we share a recording of our live event at Norfolk and Norwich Festival in June 2024, celebrating our new anthology: Poems as Friends.


Michael Shaeffer is joined by contributors to the anthology Roy McFarlane and Hannah Jane Walker, to read a selection of the poems found within its pages, alongside the stories of the readers who have known them as friends.


We are incredibly grateful to the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and the National Centre for Writing for hosting us for this very special event - part of the City of Literature programme - and for all their passion and support for our work with poems as friends. City of Literature is a Norfolk & Norwich Festival and National Centre for Writing presentation, programmed by the National Centre for Writing.


We hope you enjoy listening in!


Poems as Friends: The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology is available now from all good bookshops in the UK and online. It is co-authored by Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer and published by Quercus Editions.


Hannah Jane Walker is An award winning writer, performer and poet with a socially engaged practice, often collaborating with visual arts organisations and artists. Have made work in the following formats: theatre, poetry, non-fiction, radio, public and visual art. Her work deals with emotion, vulnerability and the human experience. It has been praised for its: humour, sincerity, engagement and poetic ambition.


Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and has spent most of his years living in Wolverhampton - and more recently in Brighton. He has held the role of Birmingham’s Poet Laureate, Birmingham & Midland Institute’s Poet in Residence, and is currently the UK Canal Poet Laureate. He has three collections published by Nine Arches Press: Beginning With Your Last Breath (2016); The Healing Next Time (2018), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and Living By Troubled Waters (2022). In 2023, Roy McFarlane was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.



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