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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Suswati Basu
Suswati Basu – A Poetic Testament to Resilience and Adaptation Suswati Basu’s contribution to the 52 for 26 poetry project – Hide and Seek – is a piece that sits quietly at first glance, yet carries a profound emotional resonance. It is a poem shaped not by abstraction but by lived reality — an intimate reflection on what it means to navigate the world when the tools you rely on begin to slip through your fingers. Basu…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Pete Carr
Pete Carr: The Art of Looking Closer… Photography began for Pete Carr as a creative outlet, but the reasons he was drawn towards it reveal something fundamental about the way he sees the world. The technology appealed to his autistic fascination with how things work, while the immediacy of pressing a shutter and seeing something you have made appear on the back of the camera provided a form of creative gratification that drawing had never…
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Arts and Culture
Grindr: The Opera! Writer Erik Ransom on Love, Lust and the Search for Connection
When Erik Ransom first began writing Grindr: The Opera!, Grindr wasn’t even the subject. The piece began life as Manhunt: The Opera, inspired by Ransom’s fascination with the wildly contrasting intentions he encountered on early online dating and hook-up sites. Some users were looking for sex, others romance, some something considerably more complicated. Beneath all those different desires, however, Ransom recognised a common thread: connection. With a background in classical music and a taste for…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Pauline Smith
Pauline Smith – Unearthing the Family Stories We Inherit Poems arrive with a depth that stops you mid-stride, and Pauline Smith’s The Point of No Return is one of them. Written for Liverpool Noise’s 52 for 26 poetry project, this poem unearths a story long buried beneath family silence and the heavy legacy of the Suez Crisis. Smith turns her attention to her uncle John, once a young swimming attendant whose life was abruptly rerouted by conflict in…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Laura Ferries
Invisible Structures: Finding Poetry in the Overlooked – THE SCAFFOLDER by Laura Ferries Scaffolding is meant to be temporary. It rises, supports, and disappears—essential to creation, yet almost always ignored. For Liverpool poet and spoken word artist Laura Ferries, this became the perfect lens through which to explore permanence, impermanence, and the hidden frameworks in our lives. The poem draws inspiration from her brother James, a scaffolder whose work took him high above Bramley-Moore Dock during the construction…
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Arts and Culture
Sean Street’s Candlelight Finds Beauty, Memory and Hope in Everyday Moments
Sean Street’s Candlelight: Finding Light in the Fleeting Moment… A candle flame is one of life’s simplest images. It offers warmth, illumination and companionship, yet it also reminds us of how fragile existence can be. For acclaimed poet, broadcaster and author Sean Street, that delicate balance between light and shadow forms the emotional heart of his latest poetry collection, Candlelight. Street has long been recognised as one of Britain’s most distinctive literary voices. Alongside an…
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Music
Only Child Reimagines Bruce Springsteen Songs on New EP
Only Child shines a new light on Bruce Springsteen’s enduring songs… Bruce Springsteen’s songs have never belonged solely to Bruce Springsteen. Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, his music has travelled far beyond the streets of New Jersey, finding a home wherever ordinary lives are shaped by hope, hardship and resilience. It is that universal quality that lies at the heart of the latest release from Liverpool songwriter Alan O’Hare and his acclaimed…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Jack Horner
Punk Energy, Political Fire: The Evolution of Jack Horner A particular voltage that runs through Jack Horner’s work—an electric, post-punk charge that feels as though it’s been wired directly into the national mood. Better known to many as Leon the Pig Farmer, Horner has built a reputation as one of the North’s most uncompromising performance poets, delivering verse with the urgency of someone who’s stared down the worst and decided to speak anyway. Three books…
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Arts and Culture
52 for 26 Poetry Project: Helen Harrison
Helen Harrison: A Northern Voice with National Reach There’s a moment in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark when the character Thaw delivers a line that lingers long after the page is turned: “if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” It’s a sentiment that lands with particular resonance when thinking about the towns that sit just beyond Liverpool’s gravitational pull – the Prescots, the Kirbys, the in-between places that…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Neve Smith
Neve Smith – Finding Humour in the Noise of an Anxious Mind Poetry has a unique ability to take experiences that can feel isolating and make them instantly recognisable. For this edition of Liverpool Noise’s 52 for ’26 Poetry Project, Neve Smith does exactly that with It’s Not Spiders, a poem that transforms the private turbulence of anxiety into something vivid, compelling and deeply human. At first glance, the poem appears disarmingly playful. Smith adopts…
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Arts and Culture
Creative Spotlight: In Conversation with Ursula Starr
Ursula Starr – Process, Place and the Freedom to Experiment… Making art for Ursula Starr has never been about arriving at definitive answers. Instead, it is an ongoing conversation with landscape, memory and material; a practice shaped as much by curiosity as experience, where experimentation is not simply a method but a philosophy. Across decades of painting and printmaking, she has cultivated an approach that remains remarkably open—one that values discovery over certainty and embraces…
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Arts and Culture
52 For 26 Poetry Project: Louise Evans
Louise Evans – Where Language, Feeling, and Music Meet in a Moment of Joy Louise Evans arrives to the 52 for 26 project with an academic’s precision and a performer’s instinct for rhythm. Fresh from completing her doctorate, an exploration of Spanish, digital poetry, and the ways female identities are shaped and reshaped in the contemporary creative economy, Evans brings a thoughtful, multilingual sensibility to her work. She teaches Spanish at the University of Liverpool…
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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…
