A Break in the Waves

In this episode, recorded live at Push the Boat Out in November 2025, Len Pennie joins Festival Director Emma Collins to discuss her acclaimed collection poyums annaw, exploring themes of patriarchy, gender-based violence and social injustice through poetry and humour. Featuring readings from the collection and reflections on the power of Scots language, this episode offers a fierce, funny and deeply personal conversation.

In this special episode, recorded live at Push the Boat Out in November 2025, two of the most compelling voices in contemporary poetry come together for a haunting and illuminating conversation, chaired by Jenny Niven, Director of Edinburgh International Book Festival. Pascale Petit and Fiona Benson – shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize seven times between them – read from and discuss their darkly beautiful latest collections, offering insight into the creative forces that shape their work. In Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters a world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic, allowing the women accused of witchcraft to speak back across the centuries. Her poems give voice to artists, dreamers and outcasts, confronting the deep-rooted fears that surface in the face of the unknown. Pascale Petit’s Beast, meanwhile, roams through landscapes both mythic and familial, peopled with creatures that are at once intimate and untamed. Even as they question the possibility of survival, her poems insist on art-making as an act of defiance and hope. Together, in conversation, they explore myth, memory, wildness and the transformative power of poetry.

Becoming a father is not an easy process: the sleepless nights and burden of new responsibilities can weigh heavily. But amidst the challenges, there’s an untold joy that comes with meeting your child and discovering a new kind of love that can reshape your world. Raymond Antrobus and Niall Campbell have written extensively about fatherhood, love, and masculinity. Antrobus’s most recent collection, ‘Signs, Music,’ reflects on imminent fatherhood and stepping into this role, while Campbell’s collections ‘Noctuary’ and ‘The Island in the Sound’ are filled with the discoveries of what it is to become a father. Recorded at Push the Boat Out 2024. Recording by EHFM.

Contemporary poetry can challenge, explore uncomfortable truths, and bear witness to unimaginable experiences. In Sasha Dugdale’s new collection, The Strongbox, recent history and Greek mythology meet. Her varied cast of characters are abducted to foreign lands, travel through war zones, and are haunted by conflicts. Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Beginning as a poetic journal kept from her hometime in Ukraine, 2021-22, it chronicles events as the poet, her family and community prepare for airstrikes, as well as nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. As part of Push the Boat Out in 2024, Sasha and Oksana discussed what it was to write poetry in times of conflict. The event was chaired by Alice Eaves through the ConVERSE Emerging Chairs Programme with the University of Edinburgh.

In partnership with the Forward Prizes for Poetry, Push the Boat Out brought together two poets who released razor sharp collections in 2024 to discuss their work. Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake shows us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending while Ella Frears’ Goodlord: An Email is a genre-defying book that takes the form of one long email, addressed to an estate agent. Chaired by Push the Boat Out Festival Director, Emma Collins.

Disrupting the Narrative opened Push the Boat Out in 2024 with a theatrical performance exploring Edinburgh’s heritage from the perspective of its colonial past and uncovering stories of the city that haven’t always been acknowledged. Behind Disrupting the Narrative is a discussion based on the performance that further explores how art can contribute to the decolonisation of our heritage and the importance of doing so. Curator of Discomfort at the Hunterian Museum Zandra Yeaman, founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association Lisa Williams, and poet and anti-racist campaigner Shasta Ali, join the former Edinburgh Makar Hannah Lavery to discuss Disrupting the Narrative and the decolonisation of Edinburgh’s past. Part of the Edinburgh 900 Anniversary programme.

Our latest podcast episode was recorded at our 2023 festival. Three hugely talented lyricists – rising indie star Hamish Hawk, Scottish folk legend Karine Polwart and celebrated cross-disciplinary artist Inua Ellams – come together to offer rare insights into the processes behind creating a song. What inspires the vivid imagery and metaphor in their work and how do they bring this into conversation with music? What do poetry and songwriting have in common? What is music able to communicate that words can’t?

Listen to our new podcast episode recorded from our 2023 festival. This month, Jenny Niven talks with Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey as they read some of their favourite poems from their co-published anthology Poetry for the Many. This beautiful new anthology features wide-ranging poems that have moved and enlightened them and, they hope, go some way to democratising poetry. William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Maya Angelou and Linton Kwesi Johnson are included, with contributions by Maxine Peake, Michael Rosen and Ken Loach, to name some. Expect heartfelt readings and conversation on socialism, language and love poetry.

Hear work from two new stunning debut collections from Scotland-based poets K Patrick and Marjorie Lotfi recorded at our 2023 festival. K Patrick’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021. Their debut novel, Mrs S was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their forthcoming collection Three Births manoeuvres through marriage and divorce, nature writing and 20th Century literary figures, culminating in the subtle but powerful message that we should be able to inhabit the body we want to and love freely within this. Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection The Wrong Person to Ask is a book of two halves, each a meditation on home, both the places where we begin and end up in our lives. From a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution to life in America and then Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.

To tell your story is to create it. In this double bill, Kim Moore and Iona Lee both share poems and lyrical essays firmly written from the female gaze. In All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore reckons with the harms and coercions of being female in a male-dominant world. Moore’s 2023 collection of lyric essays, Are You Judging Me Yet? Poetry and Everyday Sexism, turns the spotlight onto poetry and performance itself. Reflecting on responses to All the Men I Never Married, Moore examines the dynamics of performing in public as a female poet. Iona Lee’s debut collection Anamnesis charts a descent into adulthood, exploring truth and taletelling, art and artifice. Characterised by a deep love of language, its music and its magic, Anamnesis reflects on memory, the future and other hauntings. In a world still set to undo and unmake the experiences of women, these precise and honest works are as welcome as ever.

Eduardo C. Corral is a poet of many honours, awards, and residencies across America. A current teacher in the MFA programme at North Carolina State University, Corral is globally recognised for his harmonious blending of English and Spanish. Corral’s poetry is a tender exploration of history and sexuality, ensuring him a well-earned place on an international stage. Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, ‘Another Way to Split Water’, reflects on so much: longing and loss, heritage, identity, and faith. Like the water which features so vastly in the collection, Pirmohamed’s voice flows and tumbles across the page. The winner of the Edwin Morgan Award, 2020, this poet is one ready to make a mark on the contemporary poetry landscape.

Push the Boat Out Festival 2022 commissioned seven innovative poets to reimagine some of Scotland’s most famous and infamous mythical beasts for this event, A Poetry Feast of Mythical Beasts. Continuing a rich, global tradition of new writing which retells traditional tales of old, these fresh and dynamic perspectives pull our selkies and fairies into the twenty-first century. With Hollie McNish, Dave Hook, Katie Ailes, Ceitidh Campbell, Anita Mackenzie, Julie Rea and Calum Rodger, expect poetry which challenges the old stories, refreshing rap, and maybe even some dance. Each poem was supported by illustrations from our partner artists Neil and Charley from design company Púca Printhouse, creators of the beautiful map, ‘The Mythical Beasts of Scotland’. This event has been supported by the Gaelic Books Council, the Year of Stories 2022 Community Stories Fund, delivered in partnership between VisitScotland and Museums Galleries Scotland with support from National Lottery Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players.

The amazing Zaffar Kunial and Andrés N. Ordorica perform live at Push the Boat Out 2022, in Summerhall's Anatomy Theatre. Produced in collaboration with EHFM. Zaffar Kunial has long been established as one of the UK’s most essential voices in contemporary poetry. A guide across countries and cultures, histories and memories, Kunial is a Faber poet who not only anchors his readers to the earth, but sets them flying high, too. Andrés N. Ordorica’s poetry has exploded into the Scottish literary scene. His graceful debut collection, ‘At Least This I Know’, is a journey through grief and love to find belonging: both as an immigrant person in new countries and as a queer person searching for a found family.

The amazing Leyla Josephine performs live at Push the Boat Out 2022, in Summerhall's Anatomy Theatre. Produced in collaboration with EHFM.

Poet, novelist, screenwriter, essayist and editor Kevin MacNeil reads 'On a Plane That Is Like a Finger Pointing at The Moon', in Gaelic and English. 'Fleeting, physical, boundless...' Kevin's poetry transports.

Welcome to A Break in the Waves, a moment of poetry brought to you by Push the Boat Out. Rachel McCrum is a poet, performer, and educator originally from Northern Ireland. During her 6 year stay in Edinburgh, before moving to her new home of Montreal, Rachel was BBC Scotland’s first Poet-in-Residence, a recipient of a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, and one half of the much loved poetry duo, Rally and Broad. Winner of the 2012 Callum Macdonald Memorial Award for her first pamphlet, The Glassblower Dances, Rachel’s first collection, The First Blast to Awaken Women Degenerate, is now available in both English and in a bilingual French-English edition. In today’s A Break in the Waves, Rachel brings to us an excerpt from her longer suit of poems, Clean Sheets.

Break In The Waves Solareye - Recycling by Push the Boat Out

Break In The Waves Nadine Aisha Jassat by Push the Boat Out

Esa Aldegheri's poem 'Tone', recorded and posted to celebrate and acknowledge International Women's Day.

Arresting visceral poem about sex and male desire from award winning poet Andrew MacMillan for Push the Boat Out, Edinburgh's International Poetry Festival

Roger is a writer who has performed worldwide. He is the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2019 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020, shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2020 and shortlisted for The OCM Bocas Poetry Prize , The Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, highly commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. His latest collection ‘A Portable Paradise’ was a Newstatesman book of the year. He was chosen by Decibel as one of 50 writers who have influenced the black-British writing canon. He is an alumnus of The Complete Works and he has toured extensively with the British Council.

Janette Ayachi reads 'Adriatic Sea' for our series, Break in the Waves.

A new poem from award winning indigenous Australian poet Tony Birch's forthcoming collection (2021), Whisper Songs.

Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney, living in Leith. Their collection Tonguit (2015) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Games (2018) for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire Prize for Best Collection. They have a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Their theatre has toured globally, including to Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), Verb Festival (Aotearoa) and Teszt (Romania). Their performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category. www.harryjosephine.com

Poetry and Me, a poem by Hannah Lavery for Push the Boat Out

A series of short poems from leading poets, when we all need poetry more than ever, curated by Push the Boat Out.

A series of short poems from leading poets, when we all need poetry more than ever, curated by Push the Boat Out.

A series of short poems from leading poets, when we all need poetry more than ever, curated by Push the Boat Out.

A series of short poems from leading poets, when we all need poetry more than ever, curated by Push the Boat Out.