Bark, Archive, Splinter by Jay Gao - Tuesday 13/8/24 @ 6pm

Award-winning Edinburgh poet Jay Gao returns from New York to celebrate his newest collection, the ecopoetic experiment Bark, Archive, Splinter, inspired, in part, by the commonplace book, by medieval texts, these fragments aim to bring together intimacies of wood, race, desire, via a sylvestral grammar and syntax, via a poetics of grafting. 

Linden K McMahon & Éadaoín Lynch - Thursday  15/8/24 @ 6pm

Join us for an evening of poetry readings from two local poets! 

A vibrant voice in queer poetry, Linden McMahon returns to Scotland and to Stewed Rhubarb Press with a new pamphlet.

This selection of ecopoetry begins with disconnection – from each other and our ecosystems – and reaches towards connection. Via goldfinches and skyscrapers, brambles and libations, compost and glitter, these poems feel along the sometimes strange and uncomfortable threads that link us to our ecologies – expanding the magic of queer kin-making across the borders of species.

Éadaoín Lynch’s debut pamphlet Fierce Scrow contends with the earthy and the elemental.

Taking the reader through the beautiful and bleak Burren landscape, these poems reflect place as a memory, from ancient ruins to lost connections to placenames themselves.

With adept shifts in tone and language, Lynch plays with a postcolonial inheritance and a queer resistance, showing a keen awareness of their heritage and their legacy – ‘Living between one bow stroke and the next.’

Anthony Capildeo & Jeda Pearl - Friday 16/8/24 @6:30pm

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). 

Polkadot Wounds is a delight, wrestling with life in our restless times. Capildeo entices us to enter conversations with others (dead and living), amongst glimpsing reflections of encounters. Landscapes become 'landskips', playing on traditions of travel and nature writing, childlike spontaneity and movement across gaps.

Dante's Divine Comedy frames untimely deaths and breakthroughs of joy, during the pandemic and in queer and far-flung communities. The title of the book is inspired by the stones of the ruined Norman castle in Launceston, Cornwall, and the local martyr, St Cuthbert Mayne, where Capildeo was writer-in-residence with the Charles Causley Trust.

Jeda Pearl is a Scottish Jamaican writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2022, she was shortlisted for the Sky Arts RSL Award and longlisted for the Women Poets’ Prize. Art installations include Windrush Legacy Creative Reflections (2023), Caledonian Biotech Library, 3033 (Scottish Storytelling Centre, 2022) and Acts of Observation (Collective, 2021). Performances include StAnza, Hidden Door, Push the Boat Out, Cymera, Loud Poets and Edinburgh International Book Festival. Her poems and short stories are published by New Writing Scotland, Open Book, Not Going Back to Normal, Shoreline of Infinity, Aesthetica, Tapsalteerie, Luna Press and Stewed Rhubarb. Her debut poetry collection, Time Cleaves Itself, is published by Peepal Tree Press. Her poems and stories appear in art installations and several anthologies. 

In Jeda Pearl’s debut collection, Time Cleaves Itself, a disabled Scottish woman of colour invites you into the split and rewoven threads of her intersecting, in between worlds as she navigates belonging and claiming space. 

Landscapes and bodyscapes are brought into focus through lenses of race, illness, disability and womanhood. Ancestral languages of Scots, Patois, Geordie and English critique ableism, colonialism and Scottish exceptionalism; they ask ‘Who gets the trees?’, honour Caribbean and Scottish heritages and move from the bed as universe to fantastical and science-fictional imaginings. 

Here, lyrical acts of observation unfold with defiance, tenderness, rhythm and the occasional side-eye. The accordion of time stretches across poems that deliver a sonic meditation on memory, grief, disability, belonging, empathy and resilience.

On Mother Tongues and Diaspora Literatures: Yilin Wang, Alycia Pirmohamed, Lesa Ng, Hosted by Tim Tim Cheng - Saturday 17/8/24 @ 6pm

Four celebrated authors and poets, both local and global, come together to read work on mother tongues and diaspora literatures.

Wonderboy by James Matthewson - Sunday 18/8/24 @ 6pm

James Matthewson grew up with an Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Asperger's syndrome, except until the age of twenty, he didn't know it. Through poetry and the written word, James has documented an experience that will be all too familiar to many young people throughout the world. The overwhelming desire to fit in, to be ‘normal', and to attempt to navigate a challenging mainstream school system is ingrained in the moving words that make up his debut book 'Wonderboy', proudly published by Olympia. 

The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi - Tuesday 20/8/24 @ 6pm

Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection is a book of two halves, each a meditation on the idea of home, both the places we start and end up in our lives. Spanning a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution, through years as a young woman in America, to her current home in Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.

The Art of Self-Publishing with Sophia Hembeck and Luke Winter

- Wednesday 21/8/24 @ 6pm

Join us for an illuminating conversation on self-publishing from two Scotland-based writers and artists. 

Sophia Hembeck is a writer and visual artist based in Edinburgh. Her first book of essays “Things I Have Noticed” was published 2020. Her second book of essays “Things I Have Loved” came out in February 2023. She is currently working on her third. 

Who are these people who pass us in the street? Luke Winter sat down on a bench with a typewriter and offered to write custom stories for strangers, all they needed to give him was a topic. The first collection recounts thirty-five of the stories that strangers asked Luke to write in city streets across Europe and the USA. A blend of narrative non-fiction and flash-fiction shorts, this book is a journey through the unconscious of the everyday and the hearts of strangers. 

Interpret Magazine Issue 12 Launch - Gabrielle Tse, Haig Lucas, James Appleby, Xabier Usabiaga (and more to come!) - Thursday 22/8/24 @ 6pm

Join us at Typewronger to celebrate the launch of Interpret Issue 12! Interpret is Scotland's new magazine of international writing: open to anyone, anywhere, in any language. We've featured winners of the International Booker, US National Book Award, and poets receiving their first ever publications. Issue 12 is our best yet, so we hope to see you on August 22nd! 

An Afternoon of Poetry with K Patrick & Rachael Allen

- Friday 23/8/24 @3pm

Join us for an afternoon double bill we are thrilled to host! 

K Patrick is a writer based in Scotland. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021, the same year that K was also shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize. In 2023 they were shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award.

Their debut novel, Mrs S, published by Fourth Estate (UK) and Europa (US) was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their debut poetry collection, Three Births, was published by Granta Poetry this March.

An extraordinary and playful debut collection by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, exploring the joy and fluidity of queer love. An interrogation of the erotic and romantic becomes refracted, as though through a prism, towards beings, lovers, states, objects, landscapes, systems, in K Patrick's ground-breaking debut book of poems. These are notes towards a contemporary queer experience that emerge from the body, dodging and playing with logic to create a brand new poetics.

Patrick's subversive and distinct poetic manoeuvres through a marriage and a subsequent divorce, nature writing and 20th Century literary figures with agility, delicacy, candour, and humour. By turns both innovative and empathetic, Three Births documents the absurdity of obsessive desires, giving room to states of flux and flow in the body, relationships, ecology and place. George Michael, the history of inches, the ache that lives behind a 'rigid seam': a high-wire linguistic utopia is put forward in Patrick's easy-going, cool and ironic tone, which zaps with syntactic-synaptic wildness.

Three Births culminates in the subtle but powerful message that we should be able to inhabit the body we want to inhabit and love freely within this. 

Rachael Allen's first collection of poems, Kingdomland, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. She was the recipient of a Northern Writers' Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She was born in Cornwall and works as an editor and lecturer in London.

God Complex is a sweeping and corrosive epic, a narrative poem that tells the story of the breakdown of a relationship against a backdrop of progressive environmental degradation. A grieving body moves through states of toxicity, becoming an instrument for measuring the impact of pollutants. an entwining of human and non-human, built environment and natural landscape blurs perspective and distorts logic, creating an erratic decline into disorder.

Loss is divined everywhere: in human relations, in the ruptures of class and privilege, and the poisoning of the planet. It is through a purgatorial leavening of pain that the narrator comes to terms with the delicate, shifting states of the ecological systems that merge with and surround us to create new forms of being and devotion. The result is visionary - a book that vibrates with urgency and feeling. 

Iona Lee: Typewronger Writer in Residence - Saturday 24/8/24 @6pm

Join us for a conversation with the first Typewronger Writer in Residence, Iona Lee, as she discusses her process and her zine collaboration with Typewronger Risograph Studio.

Poet, artist, and performer Iona Lee was born in Edinburgh in 1996. She studied illustration at the Glasgow School of Art, and has a 1st class MFA in philosophy and fine art from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Iona has performed her poetry in venues and on festival stages all over the UK and Europe, appearing on radio and television, and her poetry and essays have been published extensively, in the likes of Hachette publishing’s ‘Poems for a Green and Blue Planet’, Gutter, The Scotsman and ‘The Modern Craft: Powerful Voices on Witchcraft Ethics’. Her critically acclaimed debut collection, Anamnesis, was published by Polygon in 2023, and was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Award. Iona has won the John Byrne award for her film poetry, was the Scottish slam champion in 2016, and has been shortlisted for a Saltire award.  

Open Mic: Book Fringe Edition! - Sunday 25/8/24 @7pm

Edinburgh's anarchic open mic night where there's no limit on what can be performed, only how much time performers get! 

We run for 90 minutes, and divide that time by the number of performers who sign up to get our set times. There's a bell 30 seconds before the end of each set, and a gong at the end which performers CANNOT go past! 

Sign up is 7-7.30 - comedy, music, poetry, short stories, film scripts, magic acts - we've had all sorts over the years, so just rock on down! 

All that is needed is a Dream - Monday 26/8/24 @6pm

Readings on imagination, dreaming, belonging and nature from a new local poetry anthology from the Edinburgh Regenerative Futures Fund edited by Shasta H Ali and JL Williams.