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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Pete Scott
Everyday life, mental health, and the rhythms of the city captured in verse Pete Scott is part of the quieter but no less vital strain of voices on Liverpool’s poetryscene. An autistic poet, he draws much of his inspiration from the observations ofeveryday life, from the rhythms of a city and its people, and from the challenges andcomplexity of mental health. He’s taken to open‐mics around Liverpool to share hiswork, and is currently working on…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Irene Stuart
A personal journey from trauma to creative expression, told through poetryLiverpool has long been a city shaped by the voices of women who had to speak up long before anyone thought to listen. Irene Stuart is one of them. A playwright and poet who came to writing later in life, she discovered the power of the written word after decades spent raising two children, five grandchildren, and now four great-grandchildren. What followed was a creative…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Melissa Grindon
Melissa Grindon is a Liverpool-based writer, originally from Ireland. Her backgroundblends dance and literature — she holds a First Class MA in Writing from Liverpool JohnMoores University and a First Class BA in Dance from Liverpool Hope University. Overtime she has moved from movement to the written word, drawn to the power ofstorytelling grounded in truth. Her debut poetry collection, Everything Grows When YouBury It, self-published in September 2025, is already circulating in local Liverpoolbookshops…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Ali Harwood
Ali Harwood – Keeping stories alive Creativity rarely sits still in the hands of Ali Harwood. Across poetry, storytelling, visual art, performance and education, the Liverpool-based artist has spent decades building connections between disciplines that many practitioners might keep separate. Rather than seeing poetry as distinct from visual art, or storytelling as different from community learning, Harwood treats them as parts of the same creative ecosystem, each informing and strengthening the others. That approach has…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Ali Harwood
A Sonnet for the Flock: Voice, Community and the Call to Gather Poetry that’s meant to be heard carries a different kind of charge, and Ali Harwood’s We Bards are Birds arrives with its voice already tuned to the room. Written for performance at Liver Bards – the regular spoken-word gathering Harwood has hosted for over a hundred months in the basement of Ma Boyle’s Alehouse – this English sonnet is rooted in Liverpool’s live poetry…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Angie Woolfall
Angie Woolfall – words as refuge, resilience, and reclamation Angie Woolfall — known to some as “Ange (Woolf)” — arrives in the 52 for 26 Poetry Project carrying the weight and brightness of a life lived on her own terms. A Liverpool native, Angie once studied philosophy at Sandown College, where the question “why” found its lifelong home. Words have always been her havens and weapons — not just on the page, but in the world beyond it. Her…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Anthony Johnson
Anthony Johnson: A Voice Forged in Truth, Tenderness and Relentless Wit There are poets who ask you to look at the world differently, and then there are poets like Anthony Johnson—writers who insist you feel it differently. A stand-up comedian and poet from Birkenhead, Johnson has long balanced the sting of reality with the sweetness of humour, often with a playful nod to the absurd. But for the 52 for 26 Poetry Project, he steps into deeper waters,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Nicola Hardman
Nicola Hardman – Power, Performance and the Cost of Staying Quiet Nicola Hardman’s These Pandas Want You to Die arrives like a pressure valve finally giving way. Furious, funny, confrontational and painfully recognisable, the poem channels the exhaustion of existing within systems that continually demand more whilst offering less in return. Written originally as a journal entry, the piece grows out of Hardman’s frustrations around the misuse of power — particularly within the creative industries, where conversations around fairness, opportunity…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Kenneth Hesketh
Where Sound Becomes Structure — Kenneth Hesketh on architecture, atmosphere and the strange emotional power of composition. For Kenneth Hesketh, music was never simply something he did — it was an environment he inhabited. Born in Liverpool in 1968, his earliest formative experiences came as a chorister at Liverpool Cathedral, where sound itself became something physical, architectural and psychologically charged. Reflecting on those years, Hesketh says becoming a chorister at nine placed him inside “an…
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Arts and Culture
Art in the Ev Continues with Julie Lawrence’s Walking Through Seasons
Where shadow and light fold together, and return reshapes what is seen. At Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre, visual art has become part of the building’s everyday rhythm rather than a separate event—and that’s largely down to its ongoing partnership with dot-art. Their collaboration continues to open up the theatre’s spaces to a rolling programme of contemporary artists, inviting audiences to encounter new work in passing as much as by intention. It’s within this quietly evolving setting that Julie Lawrence’s latest…
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Arts and Culture
Exhibition Preview: The Diamond — Brian O’Hanlon’s Powerful Portrait of Working-Class Nightlife
The Diamond – Holding On to Something Real in a Fading Nightlife Culture. Brian O’Hanlon is a Liverpool-based photographer whose work bridges documentary storytelling and commercial image-making. Originally trained in graphic design and art direction, he spent over two decades in the creative industries before returning to photography, a shift that continues to shape his distinctive visual style. His work focuses on people, place and identity, often exploring working-class culture and contemporary British life with both sensitivity and structure.…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Rebbeca Riley
Rebecca Riley – A candid exploration of crisis, recovery and creative return. Rebecca Riley describes herself first and foremost as a performance poet, shaped by early training in dance and drama and by a creative instinct that favours collaboration. She has worked alongside musicians in recent years, developing a style in which language and rhythm are inseparable, each shaping the emotional weight of the other. Away from performance, her focus turns inward: long walks in…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Joseph Barrow
Joseph Barrow – From soil to stanza, a life lived in earth and words. Joseph Barrow has carved out a quiet but distinctive presence in Liverpool’s poetry landscape. A long-time gardener with two decades of experience running his own small business, Barrow brings an eye for detail and a naturalist’s patience to his writing. Much of his work leans toward autobiography—glimpses of lived experience shaped by the cycles of nature, the rhythm of work, and the reflective spaces in…
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Art Exhibitions in Liverpool
Preview: Being There At Bridewell Studios & Gallery
Process over polish, lines still in motion… At Bridewell Studios and Gallery this May, the line between studio and exhibition space is being deliberately blurred. Being There – Conversations in Drawing isn’t a show in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a three-week residency that invites the public into the process itself—into the uncertainty, repetition and quiet decisions that sit behind finished work. Featuring Colette Lilley, Jon Barraclough and Sarah Jane Richards, the gallery will operate as an open, working studio,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Dr Pauline Rowe
Dr Pauline Rowe – When Canada geese and a night sky offer quiet reassurance. Some poems arrive quietly, slipping into the room almost unnoticed, until their stillness makes you stop. That is very much the case with the new piece from Dr Pauline Rowe for this year’s 52 for 26 Poetry Project. Rooted in a single moment of exhausted reflection and unexpected grace, the poem grew from an evening when one of her sons was struggling. Standing in the…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Ian Martin
Ian Martin – A poet reflects on the city’s split allegiances and shared passion. Football in Liverpool has a habit of shaping more than matchdays. It settles into families, histories, and the small rituals that last far longer than any 90 minutes. Ian Martin’s contribution to the 52 for 26 Poetry Project explores exactly that: the split loyalties, the banter, and the unspoken understanding that comes from being a family divided between red and blue. Martin writes from a…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Alia Boquash
Alia Boquash – A poet shaped by heritage, community, and Liverpool’s creative undercurrents. Alia Boquash – known to many as Alia Breeze – writes with an instinct that comes straight from lived experience. Her work is shaped by realism, by the grit of south Liverpool streets, and by emotions that don’t soften themselves before arriving on the page. She describes herself as “emotionally charged, heartfelt, and slightly hard faced,” and her poetry carries that same unfiltered energy. For Alia,…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Dan Cullinan
Dan Cullinan – A reflective piece from a poet who finds calm in stillness. Dan Cullinan is a poet quietly working his way through Liverpool’s spoken-word and grassroots poetry scene. Since beginning to write seriously in 2017, Cullinan has published two collections, The Vietnam Collection and Accidentally Poetic. Beyond writing, he’s the founder and curator of the open-mic series Give Poetry A Chance, a regular fixture offering free-to-attend nights that bring together seasoned and emerging voices in poetry. With this…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Aaron Murdoch
Aaron Murdoch – a conceptual duel between typewriter and sound. Aaron Murdoch has spent three decades reading and writing material across open floors, cultivating a practice that is both iterative and restless. For Murdoch, repetition is not stagnation; every new piece is an evolving process, a reason to leave the house rather than simply retrace familiar paths. His work has appeared in underground anthologies and publications including antivirus productions’ Lastbench series, Twenty From Ten (2012), and The First Page of…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Eleanor Rees
Eleanor Rees: Where Place Becomes Voice For Eleanor Rees, poetry has never been a performance of the self. It is something quieter, more porous — a practice of attention rooted in landscape, language and the subtle negotiations between the human and the more-than-human. Across more than two decades of work, the Birkenhead-born poet has traced rivers, parks, mythic figures and post-industrial terrains, building a body of writing that listens as much as it speaks. Rees’s…
