Saboteur Awards Festival 2022: The line-up!

Now we’re nearing the first round of votes for the Saboteur Awards 2022, it seems only right that we share our incredibly exciting festival line-up with you all as well. This year’s programme is a careful mix of curated and pitched events, spanning a wide range of independent literary areas. We’re so fortunate to be welcoming industry experts, award-winning performers and more to the line-up, and we’re delighted, too, to be able to host these events entirely through Zoom, which we hope will increase accessibility for the festival as a whole.

The programme is available in full below, including links to the relevant pages for ticket sales. If you’d like to take part in the voting element of the Saboteur Awards Festival 2022, the voting form can be accessed now by clicking here.

Monday, May 9: A publishing panel featuring Isabelle Kenyon (Fly on the Wall), Aaron Kent (Broken Sleep) and Scarlett Ward-Bennett (Fawn Press). Our three industry experts will be talking with transparency about their respective experiences of establishing independent press companies, all of which have a strong ethos and mission statement at their core. Following the discussion, Isabelle, Aaron and Scarlett will welcome questions from attendees about the realities of getting work published and liaising with publishers in the independent world.

Tickets for this event are £5 and they are available now by clicking here.

Tuesday, May 10: An evening of ecopoetry from the edge with Kinara. Kinara (meaning an edge, shoreline or border in Hindi/Urdu) is a collective of women poets with inherited histories of migration and South Asian identities. Members include Anita Pati, Gita Ralleigh, Rushika Wick, Sarala Estruch and poet and translator Shash Trevett. With shared experiences of global migration and colonialism, our readings will trace links between colonial pasts and post-pandemic futures of climate crisis and global instability. The collective aims to explore how a truly global ecopoetry might include overlooked voices, from the Chipko movement in 1970’s India to the present day. Each poet will read for up to five minutes, placing their own work in the context of a global approach to the climate crisis and expanding on how their own histories have shaped and generated this work.

Tickets for this event are £5 and they are available now by clicking here.

Wednesday, May 11: Christina Wilson will facilitate a Writing for Wellbeing workshop on the theme of compassion and community, as part of her doctoral research. The workshop will put into practice Christina’s research about accessibility and inclusivity, gathering feedback from participants to contribute to the development of a methodology of inclusive practice for literary festivals. Focusing on curiosity about writing and expression, the workshop will be open to new and experienced writers; there will be no pressure to create ‘polished’ pieces of writing. Workshop participants will be invited to write from a series of writing prompts, including poetry and images, exploring times we have felt welcome, and how we might connect with ourselves and welcome each other into a writing/festival space. Christina will facilitate the opportunity to write a collaborative poem that will reflect on the feeling of welcome and community within the writing workshop.

Please note: Tickets for the workshop will be limited, particularly in comparison to other events, and all participants will need to sign a consent form ahead of taking part. This is due to some of the results from this research being used in Christina’s doctoral research.

Tickets for this event are £5 and they are available now by clicking here.

Thursday, May 12: An evening of poetry under our Best of the West Midlands banner, we’re delighted to welcome Liz Berry, Roz Goddard, and Casey Bailey (current Birmingham Poet Laureate) to the festival for an evening of rich and emotive poetry. This collective represents a wide span of writing perspectives, all of which speak to the roots of the West Midlands to some degree. Borrowing from their shared expertise in regional writing, Berry, Goddard and Bailey will deliver solo performances during this event to showcase their work and the evening will conclude with a question and answer session. During this, all three poets will welcome questions from audience members and they look forward to this open discussion dealing in poetics, publishing and pride for your roots, both in terms of writing and geographical setting.

Tickets for this event are £5 and they are available now by clicking here.

Friday, May 13: A panel featuring Rym Kechacha and Magda Knight as they discuss collaboration in a time of crisis. The cultural construct of a writer is someone holed up in their bohemian garret, toiling in solitude and silence to bring a work of genius to the world from a single, lauded soul. The reality of literature, publishing and reading is a cacophonous mess, a glorious riot of conversation, discussion, disagreement with writers and readers talking over each other across time and space. How to bridge the perception and reality? This panel will discuss the ways in which working with other writers and creators is not creatively invigorating but essential to the emerging culture of the twenty first century. The panel will consider: different kinds of collaboration within writing; internal and external barriers to collaboration; how we as artists can move away from the hero’s journey, to make our stories more representative of the collective. The panel will mix presentations, reflections, recommended reading, while also allowing for questions from the audience.

Tickets for this event are £5 and they are available now by clicking here.

Remember that alongside our festival events, we’re also orchestrating our annual awards ceremony and the first round of voting is open now. If you’d like to register your vote, you can do so by clicking here. Any questions about the programme or awards can be addressed to Charley via email at [email protected].