By Hook Or By Crook

A new word is always captivating and unpredictable. Words about relativity of real and ever-important acceptance in the text. They can be ghostly or unsteady. Or rather opposite — based on what we can perceive, remember, and use in the gaze of substances. Landscapes that build an introductory touch to the body, to the genuine attitude towards minutes of life, a muscular feeling of now. Four writers who are taking risks in different ways to make their voices visible. In what they do, one hears dissimilar things: from strong compression to provocative notion to tenderness and realism. Demanding questions and answers of what each text represents. How vulnerable and violent the noise of reality can be. This is what word works with, and many other tools of handling it. Their new, unpublished yet works, something that is already released. It is the moment of truth.This event will include new writing. Doors 6.30pm, end 9pm.Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a writer of British and Ukrainian heritage. Her debut poetry collection Food for the Dead, published by Jonathan Cape, was a winner of the 2023 Eric Gregory Award and the 2024 Laurel Prize for Best First Collection. Shevchenko Knight is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is writing a book titled The Inexpressible, a work of autotheory which examines the author’s inability to speak about her eating disorder, within a wider cultural context of anorexic aesthetics and artistic inheritance.Nick Blackburn is a writer and therapist who specialises in LGBTQ+ issues and completed a PhD in English Literature at Cambridge (on the use of quotation marks in Renaissance drama). His first novel The Reactor is out with Faber (2022).Misha Honcharenko is a Ukrainian writer based in Todmorden, West Yorkshire. His first poetry collection Skin of Nocturnal Apple was published by Pilot Press in 2023. Trap Unfolds Me Greedily is his debut novel released by Sissy Anarchy in 2024.Lauren J. Joseph is an artist and writer. Her novel At Certain Points We Touch was an Observer debut of the year. A follow up is forthcoming in 2026.