A Lovely Word presents Roundhouse Poetry Slam heats 2024

Join us for the Liverpool Heat of the prestigious Roundhouse Poetry Slam competition.

Bringing together emerging spoken word artists from across the UK to compete for a cash prize and the coveted title of Slam Champion 2024.

The Roundhouse has a trailblazing five-year partnership with international law firm Taylor Wessing. A well-known supporter of the arts, and with the Roundhouse specifically over the past few years, Taylor Wessing is the principal partner, including their dedicated support of the Poetry Slam.

Judges

Roger Hill

Roger is a freelance director, performer, arts and education consultant, writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He has presented the nation’s longest running alternative music programme on BBC Radio Merseyside for more than 35 years.

He started his career running the Everyman Youth Theatre in the 1980s, before moving to an associate director role of the main house. He has also lectured in Higher Education roles at LIPA and Cumbria University.

As the performance ‘other’ Mandy Romero, she has been an associate live artist at the Bluecoat, been commissioned by Tate Liverpool, and received an Arts Council Fellowship in Live Art at the Cable Factory in Helsinki.

Vanessa Kisuule

Vanessa Kisuule is a writer and performer based in Bristol. She has won over ten slam titles including The Roundhouse Slam 2014, Hammer and Tongue National Slam 2014 and the Nuoryican Poetry Slam. She has been featured on BBC iPlayer, Radio 1, and Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Blue Peter, Don't Flop and TEDx in Vienna. She has appeared at an array of literary and music festivals and was Glastonbury Festival's Resident Poet in 2019. She has been invited to perform all over the world from Belgium to Brazil to Bangladesh.

Her poem on the historic toppling of Edward Colston's statue 'Hollow' gained over 600,000 views on Twitter in three days. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. She has written for publications including The Guardian, NME and Lonely Planet and has publication credits in pending anthologies with Canongate, Orion and Penguin Random House.

Laurie Ogden

Laurie is a Northern multidisciplinary artist currently based in South-East London. She has just finished a UK tour & West End transfer of the National Theatre’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane (*****).

Laurie was the winner of the Ambit 2021 Poetry Prize, longlisted for the Jerwood Poetry Fellowship 2021, shortlisted for the Box of Tricks & Sky Arts SCREEN/PLAY Award & was a finalist for the Just Some Theatre Award 2020. Her debut poetry pamphlet Humaning was published by flipped eye in November 2021. She is a Barbican Young Poet alumna, Roundhouse Resident Artist 2019-2021 and a former Jerwood/Arvon playwriting mentee selected by Tim Crouch.

As an actor, she trained with the prestigious NYT REP company 2018/19, and is repped by The Artist Partnership.

She has been commissioned by the likes of Barbican, Sky Arts, Barnardos, Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Zoo Co Theatre, Nationwide, Roundhouse as well as many private commissions.