Waterstones & NPF Present: Patience Agbabi, Ben Norris & Chris McLoughlin

Sure to be a highlight of the festival, the Sillitoe room hosts an afternoon of more incredible poetry. Patience Agbabi is a poet much celebrated for paying equal homage to literature and performance. Born in London to Nigerian parents and fostered in a white English family in North Wales, her work moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage. After reading English at Pembroke College, Oxford, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Sussex University.
A self-proclaimed ‘poetical activist’, Agbabi says she wrote her first largely autobiographical book, R.A.W., to right the wrongs of the world. Steeped in the plights of Thatcherite Britain, frenetic, furious and formally adventurous, the book won the 1997 Excelle literary award.
Her work is musical in every sense, attuned as much to the punning and political immediacy of the rhythms of rap and dub, as it is to traditional forms like the sonnet, sestina and Chaucer’s rime royale. Patience is accompanied by two fanastic local poets Ben Norris and Chris McLoughlin, both reading from their new collections.