12 April,
Performance / Poetry /
Poetry Reading : Denise Riley, Richard Scott and Oluwaseun Olayiwola
Saturday, 12 April 2025, 7:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €12.00 | €10.00
Book NowWe are delighted to welcome these three brilliant poets to the stage.
Denise Riley, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia, is a celebrated poet and scholar. Her acclaimed works, including Say Something Back and Lurex, explore language, identity, and grief. Riley’s contributions have earned her nominations for the T. S. Eliot Prize and Costa Book Award, among others.
Richard Scott’s That Broke into Shining Crystals, explores the darkness of injury, the potency and pain of revelation, and the agency as song. Building on his debut Soho (shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize), he examines how trauma shapes language, weaving together childhood, scars, forgotten histories, and the risks and rewards of intimacy.
Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s debut Strange Beach, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, features intimate, erotic, ecological and philosophical poems that illuminate the body as a porous landscape where existential dramas, filial fractures, and sexual reckonings unfold.
Denise Riley lives in London. Her books are War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005) and Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012). Poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017), Lurex (2022).
Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His first book Soho (Faber & Faber, 2018), was a Gay’s the Word book of the year and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize. His second poetry collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in February 2025. Richard teaches poetry at the Faber Academy and is a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His poetry has been translated into German and French.
Oluwaseun (Seun) Olayiwola is a poet, critic, choreographer and performer based in London. His creative and critical work has been published in: the Guardian, The Poetry Review, PN Review, Oxford Poetry, the Telegraph, the TLS and elsewhere. His choreographic work has been presented at the V&A, The Place, The Central School of Ballet, and Studio Voltaire. He’s been commissioned by Royal Society of Literature, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Southwark Council, and Studio 3 Arts. Seun has an MFA in Choreography from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2018-2019. He recently began lecturing in dance in the Kingston School of Art. Seun is a member of the inaugural Rose Choreographic School at Sadler’s Wells.
