The very special launch of the Autumn issue of Poetry London features live readings from Lucy Mercer, Mona Arshi, Clore Prize judge Sasha Dugdale and the three winners of the 2019 Prize, and Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. Please join us to hear some of the magazine’s most distinguished contributors reading their poems.

Mona Arshi was born in West London where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer for a decade before she started writing poetry. She was a prize-winner in the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester Creative writing competitions. Her debut collection, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Her second collection Dear Big Gods was be published by Pavilion Poetry in Spring 2019.

Simon Armitage was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 2015 to 2019, and in May 2019 was appointed UK Poet Laureate. He has published twelve full-length collections, most recently Paper Aeroplane, Selected Poems 1989–2014 (Faber, 2014) and Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic (Faber, 2019). His medieval translations include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl which won the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is a broadcaster, playwright, novelist and the author of three best-selling volumes of non-fiction. Armitage writes and records with the band Land Yacht Regatta and is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

Sasha Dugdale is a poet, translator and current Writer-in-Residence at St John’s College Cambridge. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Joy, published by Carcanet in 2017. Dugdale translates poetry and plays from Russian and is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Lucy Mercer lives in London. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she was awarded the inaugural White Review Poet’s Prize. lucy-mercer.com