The National Gallery with Toby Jones, Yemi Dipeolu, Nadia Jordan

A wonderful night at The National Gallery, with Toby Jones, Yemi Dipeolu, Nadia Jordan and I presenting new works of poetry and writing in response to paintings we chose from Room 32. The 11th in the series, which has run since 2023, it was grand to have so many people turn out in one of the grandest rooms in the gallery. I worked with both Yemi and Nadia at Kingston University, and getting to meet their families and friends, they did everyone proud. It was a pleasure too to work with Toby Jones for the first time; he was as generous, curious and brilliant as his reputation suggests. His presence certainly elevated what has consistently been an outstanding series of events. https://www.stevenjfowler.com/nationalgallery/ I wrote poems on works by Caravaggio and Gentileschi, the latter of which is on video below.

Barabus launch : June 5th at Brick Lane Books

Please join me on June 5th, 7pm, at Brick Lane Books for the launch of my new novella Barabus from Tenement Press. After readings I'll be in conversation with Luke Kennard about the book. bricklanebookshop.org/product/book-launch-barabus-by-sj-fowler-5th-june/ 

Resonance FM, Live Literature - Interview about Barabus

Tony White was one of the first authors I met when I started wanting to be a poet and writer, I attended a workshop he did in London in 2009. He’s someone I’ve long admired, and so it was extra special to feature on his return to Resonance radio, in the first episode of a new run of his Literature Live show, alongside the brilliant Andrea Mason. I had the chance to read from my new novella Barabus and talk about the show and more. Full episode here https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/literature-live-4th-may-2026/ and a cut for my youtube

New Books in German : Interview with Sarah Hemens

Really pleased to conduct a conversation with Sarah Hemens, who heads up New Books in German, about the upcoming 9th edition of the European Poetry Festival https://www.new-books-in-german.com/the-european-poetry-festival/ An excerpt here below

I was struck by the breadth of partners involved in the festival, both international organisations as well as national initiatives. What does this suggest about the relevance and resonance of European poetry today?

I’d be cautious to draw any wider conclusions on relevance, just as a mode. I believe the festival has been sustainable, psychologically or emotionally, shall we say, being run by one person, because I am not trying to create any utopian or over arching impact. I’m just trying to create singular evenings, where people create unusually dynamic collaborative live poetry in an environment where it is friendly, funny, hospitable and down to earth. I want to meet people, connect them and put literary and avant-garde poetry in an open space. European poetry carries such powerful traditions in this regard, so it all fits together. The volume of partners is due to their generosity? Their trust? And maybe our consistency? Or the energy of the thing? My desire to reach out? To make more of what we have? I hope so. It’d be lovely if this speaks to a resonance for European poetry here in the UK, but I think it’s not for me to say, but for me to do, if that makes sense. Naturally I personally believe fervently in the resonance of European poetry today.

The Austrian and Swiss celebrations both feature poets working in collaboration with British counterparts to present new work. What stands out to you about the poetry scenes in Austria and Switzerland, and what is distinctive about these collaborative exchanges?

Yes these are two of the fest’s most generous and consistent partners. They really believe in what we are doing and we’re grateful for that because it means audiences get to see what is happening in these two nations in the UK every year. Some audience members do follow the work of these poets after the events and they become a way into to things happening in these nations that might otherwise be opaque. I wouldn’t want to make generalisations about the scenes in these countries but I’ve found the poets I work with often are really affable as people while being very complex in their texts, and I would say it’s because the traditions are different than in the UK, and certainly ideas around modernism and language are more fundamental, and casual, and discussions are accessibility and readability are different. My work is more aligned with the scenes I’ve experienced in Austria and Switzerland and I am jealous the people who seem to win prizes in these countries are doing really intense, complex work. I could write 50 pages on this, but I’ve bored too many people too many times to do that. In addition I think performance and the tradition of experimentation in literature is more common.

Silence : a literary history, my asemic poem

Silence: A Literary History by Kate McLoughlin has recently been published by Oxford University Press. It comes in at 720 pages and is described, properly, as ‘A majestic literary history, revealing the power and possibilities of silence found in literary works… It traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings.” https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silence-Literary-History-Kate-McLoughlin/dp/019285562X

Rather unusually, it includes my work, and one of my asemic poems at that. Pretty remarkable really, and an honour. The work in question is taken from my Selected Scribbling and Scrawling from Zimzalla press https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-scribbling-and-scrawling-2nd-edition/

”Illuminating the intellectual and cultural influences shaping our relationships with silence and explores the paradoxical ways in which authors create silences through words. Medieval lyricists express complex theological notions through simple lullabies shushing babies to sleep. Renaissance sonneteers protest their tongue-tiedness in dazzling displays of verbal ingenuity. Shakespeare creates silences that stage violent misogyny, calculating statecraft, the hurt of having to grow up and hard-won equanimity. Out of political favour at the Restoration, Milton dreams of a silent paradise. Wordsworth and Coleridge are dumbfounded by the sublimity of God's creation. Jane Austen deflates pomposities with perfectly-timed pauses. Tennyson composes a three-thousand-line poem about the death of his best friend leaving him lost for words. Virginia Woolf repeatedly writes a novel about the things that people don't say.”

National Gallery : May 22nd with Toby Jones and Yemi Dipeolu

Please join Toby Jones, Yemi Dipeolu, Nadia Jordan and I on May 22nd, 7pm and free, in Room 32 of The National Gallery. 
www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/friday-lates-tour-and-poetry-readings-sj-fowler-and-guests-22-05-2026 

This event will present new poetic texts and performances responding to paintings chosen by the performers in one of grandest rooms in the gallery, led by art historian Jo Lewis. A unique walking tour event as part of the Friday Lates program, this is the eleventh commissioned in the series since 2023. All previous 10 are documented here www.stevenjfowler.com/nationalgallery/

European Poetry Festival 2026

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2026
June 17th - July 4th
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2026

The EPF returns for it’s 9th year with a summer festival of events celebrating collaboration, literary liveness and cross-linguistic inventiveness. Over 100 poets, many visiting from across Europe, will present new works at a series of ‘Camarade’ events. Celebrating the poetry of Cyprus, Switzerland, Estonia, Austria, Poland, Latvia, Norway, Flanders and more, these communal, playful, energetic events are free to attend. Please see below for that which is confirmed so far and mark the dates in your diary!

National Gallery : Year 4 - Event 1

Another great night at The National Gallery. Very proud of Mia Hale McLeod and Cerys McVea, who I’ve worked with at Kingston Uni for the full term of their degree (and they’re about to graduate) who brought their families along. Brilliant to watch Damian Le Bas work again, he’s extraordinary. And such a special connection I’ve developed with Fiona Alderton over these past four years, culminating in her chopping some of my hair off here. I read on Rubens, twisting Samson and Delilah a bit, and Jordaens, for his stare heavy Holy Family portrait. Nice crowd too, supportive and engaged as ever. One of the best things I’ve ever done this series. More to be found at https://www.stevenjfowler.com/nationalgallery

Barbican Young Poets : teaching performance

The best teaching experience outside my normal gigs for many years. An extraordinary thing Jacob Sam La Rose has done setting up and running Barbican Young Poets for nearly two decades. And in the spirit of expansiveness he has created, he invited me, on April 8th, a bit outside of the norm perhaps, and new to the set up, certainly. The poets led by Jacob and his team were uniformly alive to ideas. Really advanced in their work, they were all motivated, supportive, enthusiastic, and it seemed, very keen to hear ideas around innovative live literature. Again a massive credit to Jacob for creating such an incubator for curiosity as a means to development. I shared a lot of my own development in live literature, from talking performances and improv to sound poetry, and how I think through context and time and space and audience and things like that. I focused in on Performance Literature as a specific thing too, rooted in live literary traditions, something separate from other live mediums. I taught with a kind of meta-example at one point, leading an improvisation while dissecting the decisions I might make. It was a lovely environment and the whole experience left me inspired. I made a lot of connections too, and hope some of these really exciting poets will feature at future things I do

The Spit Bucket - issue 8

David and Lizzy Turner have done an amazing job with this unique set of zines on boxing and I’m really happy to have a poem in what I believe is the final issue, which you can download here https://writersonboxing.com/the-spit-bucket-a-boxing-fanzine/

Poetry leaflet in Austria publication

Thanks to Thomas Ballhausen an excerpt from my long poem cycle The Great Apes has been translated into German and included in a great tradition in Austrian literature - The Poetry Flyer from Podium Literature.

“Since 1973, the "Poetry Leaflet" (a leporello) has been published annually for "Poetry Day" in early March, featuring around 25 poems by Austrian poets. "Thousands of multi-page poetry leaflets were distributed, often in bitter cold, on the streets of Vienna and other cities, primarily in Lower Austria, and later sent to schools." (Alois Vogel). The poetry leaflet was distributed free of charge in large print runs, mainly to schools (for German lessons) and cultural institutions. Since 2006, the editors have rotated annually.” https://www.podiumliteratur.at/das-lyrikflugblatt/#gsc.tab=0

2026 Versopolis Camarade!

It is becoming an annual tradition that I really look forward to - hosting a Camarade event at the Poetry Society celebrating the Versopolis project during the London Book Fair. All thanks to the 16 poets who made this one as energised as previous years, and to Aljaž Koprivnikar, my fellow curator, who is inspiring to work with.

Really nice to pack the place out too, we had people on the stairs, and some of the things they witnessed, it went good weird.

All the performances are to be found here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/versopolis26

I got to work with Zuzana Husarova. It was our fourth live work together, spanning 11 years. She has always been an influence on me, a completely singular and brilliant poet, possessing a great sense of vision, dynanism, humour, originality. She deserves great credit for work and we had as much fun as ever before wearing the same clothes and waddling about.

Published : Barabus - a novella from Tenement Press

My new novella - Barabus - is now available to buy from Tenement press 

https://tenementpress.com/BARABUS

Harrowing at times, but immensely rewarding, Fowler’s novella is a moving exploration of the effort required to remain unmoved. 
—  Dan Abnett

Everything that folds from Fowler’s soft bag of brain is a phenomenal and precious gift, and one anyone truly interested in language, human coping and the murk-sparks of the mind should know. Now drive and siren back to the station and go on. —  Han Smith

Relentless, compelling, comic and sobering. —  Vanessa Onwuemezi

Frenetic and exhilarating outbursts, as eye-witness accounts from a mind’s eye of true originality.  — Andrew Kotting

" ... BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris—the acerbity of Peter Weiss—and the ambiguity of Le Clezio, Fowler’s second novella is a work of disarming directness. A paean to the costs of life lived in service of the needs of others—in riverine prose cooked down to concrete—this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity.

To be launched with a series of events this April / May, followed by broadcasts of the audio book on Resonance Extra.

A note on : Concrete poems in Adda III

Really nice to have two of my Frog Circle concrete poems in the latest, and third, issue of Adda III thanks to Andreas van Rompaey https://andreasvanrompaey.wordpress.com/ and colleagues. There are some brilliant works in the edition.

Thomas Duggan 1984 - 2025

Photograph by Alice Clough

Thomas Duggan was one of the most brilliant minds I have encountered. He had an enormous capacity for invention, and dynamic creation. He was a sculptor, a designer, an artist, a writer, an architect and a craftsman. He was my only constant collaborator from my schooldays, where I was not at all a creative person. In a true sense then, Tom was an enormous influence on me, conceptually and modally and this was absolutely true during the dozens of things we made together. I’m sure he was an influence on hundreds of people around the world, such was his generosity.

Throughout my adult life, Tom offered me a constant example of possibility. But it then must be said many of the things Tom did were not possible for me, as they would not be for most people. For example, he one day told me he had convinced the kuka robot company to drop off a robot at his studio, then he taught himself how to use it from the instructional manual, and then did so, with the safety barriers removed because they were getting in his way. He would build a piece of furniture for a friend, from scratch, on the same day he would be working with his friends at MIT on synthetic silk design and meeting with aerospace companies. Tom had an enormous capacity for brilliance when he found a direction or idea that consumed him, and though introspective, he was ever dynamic, and original.

Our collaborations were constant and ranging from the time I started to write seriously, in between his various and unpredictable projects. Tom was cinematographer on my first attempt at film, and we finished a short film together - Here You Were Never a Child - that was screened at the Toronto, Montreal and Auckland film festivals. He printed poems I wrote for him in both gold and synthetic silk, with the latter exhibited in this video at the V&A and in his exhibition at Tate St Ives. We wrote an article about that work for Nature too, spending time in Devon together drafting and editing, as we often did.

He built the set for my play Mayakovsky in 2017 and that was a magic summer with him in London where we did a performance entitled Ash that was scored by The Dirty Three, whom he knew. The same summer he contributed to an exhibition I ran by bringing live snails into the galleries to eat people’s pieces.

That someone with Tom's force of life is no longer with us seems contrary to sense. He has gone at 41 years of age and for 29 of them he was my friend. He was man of exceptional presence, character, utility, and pragmatism. He had such immediacy, and intensity and yet he was very funny, very drole. He was a really wonderful person to spend hours with, share a meal with, interesting and interested. He was an intellectually and emotionally ambitious man. He lived an amazing life, had such an abundance of friends from across the world, and where he was from. The things he did were consistently extraordinary, and I believe he used his time as we're supposed to. It is a bit paltry in the aftermath of this news, but I feel a great sense the legacy of his work should be shared, and preserved, so please do visit his website and look through just a glimpse of what he made https://thomasdugganstudio.com/

Camarade at Hundred Years Gallery

My final event of the year, for the third year running happening in December, to throw in a Camarade before 2025 comes to an end. A chance to invite old and new friends, to spend a night in one of my favourite venues with many of my favourite people. Some really special and weird collaborations, and I had a chance to duet with the legendary Phil Minton once again.

Writers Kingston event #94 - student showcase

The final event of Writers Kingston 8th year, its 94th, showcasing the brilliant current cohort of students and some select alumni at Kingston University. https://www.writerskingston.com/event94/

Loads of performances at the link above, many debuts in there, a book launch by Martin Wakefield and four collectives sharing collaborative pieces.

Shaldon Zoo reading with Jenks, Wiles, Herd

November 8th saw my third event as part of my poet in residence at Shaldon Zoo in Devon www.shaldonwildlifetrust.org.uk/visit-us alongside friends Colin Herd, Ellen Wiles, Tom Jenks and Jo Jabbi and Zak Showell from the zoo. I read to the Yellow Footed Tortoise, the Tarantula and the Goodman’s mouse lemur. “A special afternoon walking-tour event, poets from across Devon and the UK will present brand new poems, each dedicated to an animal in Shaldon Wildlife Trust. Reading to those animals (and a human audience), this event will follow the great success of events in 2024 and 2025 https://www.stevenjfowler.com/shaldonzoo