‘So Say So’ is a monthly event focusing on poetry, storytelling and music hosted by poet Stephen James Smith. Each month a renowned national (or international) poet will headline and be accompanied by local musicians Cillian and Lorcan Byrne of *Basciville in a never before seen collaboration. There will also be a 5-Word-Challenge open mic section, which is open to all (but strictly limited to 5 minutes per performer on a first come first served basis).

This space will be for all, no matter where you're from or what age. We'd also like to encourage the use of the Irish language and any other languages people may speak. All styles and genres are welcome from; poetry, rap, spoken word, monologues, storytelling and songwriters.

For this event we are offering an optional pricing scheme - pay what you feel ...

Zaffar Kunial - 22nd November in partnership with The Frederick Douglass & Civil Rights Festival this event is supported by the British Council in Ireland

Zaffar Kunial lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and was born in Birmingham. His debut collection, Us, was shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the T. S. Eliot Prize. England’s Green, his latest collection, has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.

Zaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing up the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light. In the poems of England's Green we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know and made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the 'dark missing/step in a stair', entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken. Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures - a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.

'Zaffar Kunial is a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He's a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new - a must.' Jackie Kay

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ZaffarKunial