Joelle Taylor brings a staged reading of her new poetry collection to Brighton Festival; a searing, poetic excavation of 50 years of lesbian counterculture.
Following on from her T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poetry collection C+nto & Othered Poems, Joelle Taylor’s Maryville charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history, tracing the culture, clubs and resistance that shaped their world.
The performance is directed by acclaimed writer and director Neil Bartlett, with visuals from artist and filmmaker Sweatmother. It will be followed by an on-stage Q&A and book signings.
Friday's Q&A will be chaired by poet John McCullough and Saturday's Q&A will be chaired by Dr Rosy Carrick, a poet, playwright, actor, translator and stage compere.
BSL interpreted on Sat 9 May
**Stage timings are subject to change
Joelle Taylor
Joelle Taylor is the author of four poetry collections, and one novel. C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize and 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. 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 broadcast 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 Outstanding Contribution and named in the Guardian’s 2024 Pride Power list. Her new collection Maryville was published by Bloomsbury in November.
John McCullough
John McCullough’s book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His collections have been Books of the Year for The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph and he also won the Polari First Book Prize. John’s work focuses on queer life and history in Brighton. His fifth collection, Crowd Voltage, will be published in March 2026 by Bloodaxe.
Rosy Carrick
Rosy Carrick is a writer and performer based in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. She is the author of two poetry collections: Chokey (2018) and I LOVE (2025). Rosy's theatre debut Passionate Machine won the Best New Play award at Brighton Fringe and the Infallibles Award for Theatrical Excellence at Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, before touring internationally. Her critically acclaimed second play Musclebound toured from 2024 to 2025. Rosy has a PhD on the poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and has released two collections of his work in translation. Between 2022 and 2024, she co-wrote ZA/UM Studio's cursed – and subsequently cancelled – spin-off to the explosively successful videogame Disco Elysium. This year, Rosy's debut short film Annie & Bill was selected for the Hebden Bridge Film Festival 2026.
