A Reading with Karl Riordan, Pete Green, Steve Ely and Rory Waterman

Karl Riordan is a working-class writer based in Sheffield after stints around the UK & Ireland and considering his next move.

'The Tattooist's Chair' is his first poetry collection from Smokestack Press and just published ‘Tinikling’ drawing upon his links with the Philippines. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Sheffield. Daljit Nagra said, he writes of ‘[a]n ordinary world illuminated by a seeing-eye that persistently finds understated wonder.’ By day, he’s worked underage on building sites, was a barber, scrap-collector, teacher, Disability Support Worker, and a postal worker - and lasted a full week. He currently works as a Library Assistant for the Rotherham Library Service. He’s working on another collection of poems and a book of short stories.

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Pete Green is a poet and musician who has lived in Sheffield for 20 years. They grew up in the port of Grimsby, lovingly parented by a fish filleter and a lollipop lady. Living first on the edge of the land itself, and more recently near the edge of a largely post-industrial city, Pete has become preoccupied with the way places fade into each other and shift over time – and perhaps most of all with how people influence places and places influence people. These concerns are the driving force behind Pete's first full-length collection The Meanwhile Sites, published in 2022 by Salt and described by Helen Mort as "feral, elegant and beautifully observed". Much of the book was informed by visits to coastal locations, from Orkney to Dungeness, though these are juxtaposed with observations of big cities, including the temporary London housing estate built from shipping containers which inspired the collection's title. Pete has been active as a musician for far longer than as a poet, though these days they prefer to concentrate on poetry because there's less heavy stuff to carry. Encouraged by discovering the output of Sheffield's Longbarrow Press, Pete started to write poetry again in 2014 after a gap of more than 20 years. Their pamphlet Sheffield Almanac and short book Hemisphere were published by Longbarrow in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Other work by Pete has been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Brotherton Poetry Prize, whose chair of judges Simon Armitage praised Pete's "lyrical dexterity" and described them as "a poet alive to the challenges of the post-modernist era".

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Steve Ely is a poet, novelist, biographer and teacher of creative writing. He has published thirteen books or pamphlets of poetry, most recently Eely (Longbarrow Press, 2024) and Orasaigh (Broken Sleep Books, August, 2024). He’s currently working on a critical work, Ted Hughes’s Expressionism, a novel entitled The Quoz and an infinitely expanding, limitless poetic sequence, Terra Incognito.

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Rory Waterman's fourth and most recent collection is Come Here to This Gate, published by Carcanet in April this year. He lives in Nottingham.

Event curated by Agnes Lehoczky.