European Poetry Festival : Liverpool
July 6th 2025 at Open Eye Gallery
3pm and Free Entry
19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP openeye.org.uk
Book your free ticket here! eventbrite.co.uk/e/european-poetry-festival-liverpool-tickets-1254623144599, or:
European Poetry Festival: Liverpool Tickets, Sun, Jul 6, 2025 at 3:00 PM | Eventbrite
A brilliant afternoon of live poetry including some of the most exciting poets from Austria, Norway, Romania, Scotland and the North West England. What's the format? Pairs of poets present brand new works of live literature, made for the day, and drawing upon the local Liverpudlian poetry scene as well as visiting poets. Supported by the Liverpool Poetry Space programme, this is the last event of the European Poetry Festival for 2025! (Check the other gigs: EPF 2025 — European Poetry Festival. Featuring
Thomas Ballhausen and Robert Sheppard (and we're well underway with our collaboration!)
Lena Chilari and Michael Sutton
Tom Jenks and SJ Fowler
Endre Ruset and Stephen Sunderland
Julia Rose Lewis and Alec Newman
Carolyn Hashimoto and Sarah-Clare Conlon
Lenni Sanders and David Spittle
Sarah Dawson and Andrew Taylor
Another event in partnership with Liverpool Poetry Space. Event curated by SJ Fowler and Chris McCabe.
SJ Fowler has, of course, presented many collaborative readings, and I have had the pleasure of taking part in many of them. I have collected some of them (they are always videoed and archived online) here on my website: Collaborations - Robert Sheppard. (Scroll to the end.)
On this blog, also I have featured a number of these events. Two years ago Sarah-Clare Conlon, who is back this year too, and I collaborated on our exploration of the River Mersey. I write about that, present the video, and indicate the text's publication, here, Pages: The Liverpool Camarade at Open Eye Gallery : May 2023: the videos of my collaboration with Sarah-Clare Conlon, and here Pages: UNTITLED by Sarah-Clare Conlon and Robert Sheppard is published in Blackbox Manifold 31.
That was the first Liverpool Camarade since 2015, about which I wrote here: Pages: Liverpool Camarade 2015: general introduction (set list) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) with videos, of course. I was deep in the writing of what became the collaborative anthology Twitters for a Lark at that time. But now we have real European writers.
However, this reading in Leeds in February 2017 was one of my favourites. Patricia (Farrell) was on tour and I joined her for this one gig, where I collaborated, quite explosively, with Ian McMillan. Here's an account: Pages: Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard: Simultaneous Performance: Leeds Enemies (photo, video, set list and thoughts), and here's the video:
Largely featuring S.J. Fowler's passion for 'collaboration', I wrote a critical piece on literary collaborations (‘Doubling Up: Modes of Literary Collaboration in Contemporary British Innovative Poetry’, in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. by Samuel Rogers (Yearbook of English Studies, 51.1 (2021)), 247–64). But in preparation for it, I assembled a strand of posts on this blog, about collaboration as an art, with asides on my own collaborations, beginning here, with a hubpost: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Thughts on Collaboration 1: Introduction. Not all my collaborations have been literary of course.
