Speaking up: Poetry as Activism with Inua Ellams, Fran Lock and Stephen Lightbown

Can art change the way society behaves? What can happen when we write through rage, and speak out against injustice? This event brings together three poets who have all written in response to socio-political inequalities. Globally celebrated Inua Ellams’s most recent collection, The Actual, tackles empire and its legacies of racism, injustice and toxic masculinity. Fran Lock is a member of Culture Matters, who fight for ‘our cultural struggle or ‘mental fight’ against class divisions’, and her most recent book White / Other grapples with the complexities of writing and living from the white working-class “other” within neo-liberal culture. Stephen Lightbown’s The Last Custodian puts a paraplegic centre-stage in the fallout of an apocalypse.