LitFest26

Stephanie Jones

Stephanie Jones is Professor of Literature and Law at the University of Southampton. She teaches various histories of activist writing, from environmentalist poetry to feminist manifestoes. Stephanie is writing a book about piracy, which means she spends a lot of time thinking about revolt, revolution and counterinsurgency at sea. When she is not working, Stephanie likes to sit by the water.

Toby Litt

Toby Litt is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton where he runs the Writing Programme. He is a writer and environmental activist. His novels include Corpsing, Ghost Story, and Patience, which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. He posts daily on his much-followed Substack, A Writer’s Diary. His run on the comic Dead Boy Detectives is the basis for the 8-part Netflix series. When he is not writing, Toby likes sitting doing nothing.

Dina Lupin

Dina Lupin is Associate Professor of Environmental and Human Rights at the University of Southampton. Their research focuses on environmental decision-making and used feminist, queer and decolonial theory in the analysis of epistemic and social resistance to unjust environmental processes and practices. Their current project is called Home in Crisis which takes an intimate look at climate change, relocating climate law-making to the kitchen table.

Louis Fazackerley

Louise Fazackerley went viral with her poem ‘I Want My Country Back.’ With work rooted in word-witchery and the working class, Louise explores the synergy between poetry and movement in a way that makes the ugly beautiful and the mundane fantastical. Her work was featured in The Guardian, BBC Breakfast on Radio 4 Women’s Hour and on Radio 3. Published poetry collections include The Lolitas and The Uniform Factory (Verve Poetry Press) Bird St. (The Secret Writers Club) and The Pleasure Dome (Burning Eye).

Maisie Massie-Blomfield

Amber Massie-Blomfield is a writer, arts consultant and theatre producer who believes in the power of arts and artists to create a better world using a holistic approach recognising the breadth of ways that arts communities can contribute to a flourishing future for all life.  Published by The Guardian, The Independent, The Stage, The Bookseller and the Times Literary Supplement, Amber is author of Twenty Theatres to See Before You Die (Penned in the Margins) and, more recently, Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World (Footnote Press).

Ellora Sutton

Ellora Sutton is a poet and PhD student based in Hampshire. She was the Poetry Book Society Spring 2023 Pamphlet Choice with Antonyms for Burial (Fourteen Poems); her most recent pamphlet, Artisanal Slush, was published by VERVE. Her work has been published in The Poetry Review, Magma, Oxford Poetry, The North, Propel, Berlin Lit, etc., and she has won competitions including the Mslexia Poetry Competition and the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award. She has held the position of poet-in-residence at both Jane Austen’s House and at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, the latter of which she is now proud to be a trustee of. She is the poetry reviewer for Mslexia, and the host of a popular monthly poetry night at her local indie bookshop, Goldfinch Books. Her debut full collection Little Bitch will be published by VERVE Poetry Press in April 2026.

Bradley Taylor

Bradley Taylor is an award-winning poet born and based in Birmingham. In 2024 he won the Roundhouse Poetry Slam. In 2025 he released his debut collection You Missed The Best Part with VERVE Poetry Press before embarking on a nationwide tour.

Bradley has appeared at the Hay Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, The Inspirational Youth Awards, on BBC News and on BBC Radio 6 Music as part of Craig Charle’s ‘Class of 2024’, in which Craig Charles described him as ‘a brand new voice and a fresh perspective on the art of poetry and performance’.

He writes for, and about, people.

M. L. Walsh

M.L. Walsh is a performance poet specializing in comic absurdism and the construction of narrative through voice and characterisation. Since finding her form in the poetic monologue, she has experimented with the translation of performance poetry from stage to page, and how theatrical technique (and its removal) can modify a text. Her debut collection My Dog Has Never Read This was released in March 2025 with VERVE Poetry Press.

Max Wallis

Max Wallis is a poet and editor from Lancashire, living in recovery from addiction, ADHD and complex PTSD. His work has appeared in The Rialto, Poetry London, and 14 Poems. He is the founding editor of The Aftershock Review, a landmark magazine at the forefront of urgent, transformative poetry. His pamphlet, Well Done, You Didn’t Die, was published by VERVE Poetry Press in the autumn of 2025.

Mukahang Limbu

Mukahang Limbu is a Nepalese writer based in Oxford. His poems have been published in England: Poems from a School (Picador, 2018), Poetry London, Bath Magg, Oxford Poetry, The Sunday Times, The Kindling Journal, and Tell Me the Truth About Life, an anthology curated by Cerys Matthews. His debut pamphlet Mother of Flip-Flops (Out-Spoken Press, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice. He is a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, as well as the Harper Wood Award. He is an alumni of the Language Is A Queer Thing India:UK Poetry project and features heavily in the accompanying anthology Somewhere There Is A Sky For Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from India and the UK (Verve Poetry Press, 2025) which featured on BBC 4’s The Verb and was book of the month on BBC radio 4’s Poetry Extra.

Papia Ghosal

Papia Ghosal is an international award-winning Indian Baul singer, lyricist, poet, actor and fine artist simultaneously based in London, Prague & Kolkata. Papia is blessed with an exotic and raw voice which is the voice of the soil. This unique voice connects to the soul of her followers, be it in the West, or in the East. She has passionately spent more than thirty years of her life with the bauls and fakirs of rural Bengal and acquired her spiritual and musical name Papia Das Baul from her diksha guru (music & spiritual guide), the living baul legend, Pandit Purna Das Baul Samrat, as well as shiksha guru, Sadhon Bairagi. Papia has many disciples all over the world who have joined her to practice sadhana, the body philosophy & the tantric practice of the Baul minstrels. Papia sings & dances with her baul instruments Ektara, Dotara, Ananda Lohori, Dubki & Ghungoor.