VERVE Poetry Festival, Birmingham's only poetry festival, running from the Hippodrome for nine years, is collaborating with Birmingham Literature Festival for the first time this year. BLF has invited us to programme a full day of poetry, VERVE SUNDAY, on 11th October 2026 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.
The day includes award-winning and debut poets:
11:00 - Young Poets Takeover
Open mic for poets 25 and under, with headline sets from Hala Qamar and Scarlet Timlett, hosted by Poetry Society Education Officer Cia Mangat.
13:15 - VERVE Debutants
Roma Havers, Ellora Sutton and Rupinder Kaur Waraich, hosted by Sabeen Chaudhury. Roma Havers's debut The Natural Way (Carcanet) and Ellora Sutton's debut Little Bitch (VERVE Poetry Press) are both longlisted for the 2026 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection (Forward Prizes); Rupinder Kaur Waraich's collection Tigress with Wings (Seren) completes the line-up.
13:30 - WORKSHOP: Portals, Time Travel & How to Slant and Disrupt Narrative led by Rachel Long, whose debut My Darling from the Lions was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Costa Book Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Jhalak Prize; her second collection, Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto), is out this year.
14:45 - Joelle Taylor: solo performance from Maryville
VERVE Patron Joelle Taylor won the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Prize for C+nto & Othered Poems and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She returns with a solo set from her latest collection, Maryville (Bloomsbury, 2025).
16:00 - VERVE HEADLINE EVENT
Mona Arshi, back for the first time since 2017, reads from her third collection, Mouth (Chatto); her debut, Small Hands, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2015. Sarah Howe returns for the first time since VERVE's very first festival — her debut Loop of Jade won the T.S. Eliot Prize (the first debut ever to do so) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award; her new collection Foretokens (Chatto) is shortlisted for this year's T.S. Eliot Prize. Rachel Long joins to celebrate Sparrow on the Rooftop. Hosted by Jo Bell, co-author of How to Be a Poet.
18:00 - CRATE POETRY LIVE!
Like a live Jools Holland for stage poetry. Poets include Tyrone Houghton, Nafeesa Hamid, Bradley Taylor and Maddie, hosted by Paul Stringer, with open mic.
See the full programme and book your tickets here.