Description
Join award-winning poet Joelle Taylor for a powerful solo performance inspired by her acclaimed collection Maryville, winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize and Polari Book Prize. Through vivid poetry and captivating storytelling, Taylor brings to life the forgotten histories, fierce resilience and underground communities of queer London.
Centred on the legendary Maryville butch bar, this moving performance explores the scars of oppression alongside the intimacy, solidarity and joy found within dyke counterculture and the queer underground. Blending spoken word, memoir and performance, Taylor conjures a cast of unforgettable characters whose stories pulse with defiance, humour, tenderness and survival.
Filmic, lyrical and deeply immersive, Maryville is both a celebration and an act of remembrance, reclaiming voices too often pushed to the margins. Part chronicle, part prayer and part rebellion, this extraordinary performance offers an unforgettable journey through queer history, identity and belonging from one of Britain’s most vital contemporary poets.
Related Book
About the Poet
Joelle Taylor
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 both for theatre, and into a television screenplay, and was featured on Radio Three documentary Butch. 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 a Poetry Fellow of the University of East Anglia, and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023 and has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel The Night Alphabet was published in Spring of 2024 and was named both a Spectator and Guardian Book of the Year. Her most recent radio programme A Young Girl’s Guide to Horror was broadcasted end of last year on BBC Radio Four. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. She was recently honoured with a DIVA Award for Excellence and named as number 15in the Independent’s2024 Pride Power list. Her next collection Maryville will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025
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