Please join us across various events at Summit: A Poetry School Festival, where Caroline Bird and Anthony Vahni Capildeo will be reading, attending panels and hosting workshops!

Tickets are available here.

Saturday 19th October

Reading: Laurel Longlist with Caroline Bird
15:30-16:30
Introduced by a performance from Laurel Judge Caroline Bird, the iconic YSP Chapel plays host to the 2024 Laurel Prize longlist. During the hour, we will hear excerpts from the year's most innovative and thought-provoking ecopoetic collections: books that explore the extent of the living world and its complex interconnected relationships, as well as the integral interplay between literature and activism.

Sunday 20th October

Workshop: Through the Cracks with Caroline Bird
10:00-11:30
Sometimes it'€™s hard to write surrealism when the world keeps writing it for us. How can we be playful when the stakes are so high? How can we generate ideas in a landscape of crisis? Caroline Bird will approach the task of writing a burning world with wonder, weirdness, gallows humour and, if we'€™re lucky, a little bit of hope. This session is centred on continuing to create, cultivating poems that might burst up through the cracks.

Panel: Toxic States with Anthony Vahni Capildeo
16:00-17:00
Centred on environmental damage, corrosion, pollution, consumption, and the materiality of human and more-than-human interactions, these readings will examine the extent of anthropogenic destruction and multi-species entanglement. Featuring Rachael Allen, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, and John Wedgwood Clarke. Chaired by David Higgins, Professor of Environmental Humanities, University of Leeds.

For more information, and to buy tickets, click here.


Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.  In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022.

Anthony Vahni Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Currently Professor and Writer in Residence at the University of York, their site-specific word and visual art includes responses to Cornwall'€™s former capital, Launceston, as the Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022) and to the Ubatuba granite of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds (2023), as well as to Scottish, Irish, and Caribbean built and natural environments. Their numerous books and pamphlets, from No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), Person Animal Figure (Landfill, 2005) onwards, are distinguished by deliberate engagement with independent and small presses. Their work has been recognized with the Cholmondeley Award (Society of Authors) and the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection. Their publications include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) (Poetry Book Society Choice), and A Happiness (Intergraphia, 2022). Their interests include silence, translation theory, medieval reworkings, plurilingualism, collaborative work, and traditional masquerade. Recent commissions include research-based Windrush poems for Poet in the City and for the Royal Society of Literature. Capildeo served as a judge for the Jhalak Prize (2023).