Joelle Taylor – The Night Alphabet vs. C+NTO & Other Poems

Join us for a collision of queer futurism, butch identity, & feminism with award winning poet and author Joelle Taylor. Performing from her electrifying debut novel The Night Alphabet, and TS Prize winning poetry collection C+NTO & Othered Poems, this is a rare opportunity to see both texts back-to-back.

Set across timescales and geographies, The Night Alphabet is a novel about the quantum physics of belonging, the secret language of women, & global female resistance.

C+NTO & Othered Poems was named Polari LGBT Book of the Year as well as given a Saboteur Award, and is a book about community, friendship, and the great grief that eventually leads to hope.





Reviews

‘Headrushing’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Relentlessly inventive’ Guardian

‘Powerfully moving’ The Telegraph

‘One of the most astonishing and original poetry collections of recent years’ Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman

‘Exquisitely written…extraordinary.’ The Skinny

‘Foremost literary stylist’ The Bookseller

‘Utterly dazzling…bold and brilliant’ DIVA magazine



About The Author

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including the Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet was published recently and was followed by a UK tour of a staged version of the novel, directed by Neil Bartlett. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. In 2024 she was honoured by DIVA magazine for her work and was added to the Guardian’s Pride Power List.



RT: 90 mins no interval

Book signings afterwards