Wild Court Reading Series Presents Anthony Joseph
2024-03-12 18:00 - 19:30 UTC | The Council Room, Second Floor, King's Building - Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Join us for the second event in the Wild Court Reading Series.

For this event, our featured reader is poet, novelist, musician, King’s lecturer and winner of the 2022 T.S. Eliot Prize, Anthony Joseph.

Anthony will read from his forthcoming Precious and Impossible: New & Selected Poems, published by Bloomsbury this autumn, and will be in conversation with Luke Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College London.

Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of four previous poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. His most recent fiction publication is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College, London.

Dr Luke Roberts is a poet and writer. He is the author of Home Radio (2021), Glacial Decoys (2021), and other works of poetry and prose. He is co-editor of So Much For Life: Selected Poems by Mark Hyatt (Nightboat, 2023), and editor of Mark Hyatt’s novel Love, Leda (Peninsula, 2023). He is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Poetry at King’s College, London.

Strand K2.29 Council Room is located on level 2 of King’s Building. Exit the lift, and then turn right onto the main corridor and Council Room K2.29 is on the left-hand side.​

Wild Court Reading Series Presents Sarah Howe
2024-10-16 18:30 - 19:30 | The Nash Lecture Theatre, Second Floor, King's Building – Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Join us for the third event in the Wild Court Reading Series.

For the event, we welcome award-winning poet and editor Sarah Howe who will read and be in conversation with poet and playwright Suji Kwock Kim.

Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet, poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. A new collection is forthcoming in 2025. She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool and the Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus.

Suji Kwock Kim is a poet and playwright. She was educated at Yale University, the University of Iowa, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley. As a former Fulbright Scholar, she studied at Seoul National University and Yonsei University, where her great-grandfather had been professor and dean of the graduate school and cofounder of the Korean Language Society (조선어학회), which was organized in resistance to the Japanese occupation. She is the author of the poetry collections Notes from the North (2020) and Notes from the Divided Country (2003), which won the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin Prize.

The Nash Lecture Theatre is located in room K2.31 of King’s Building, King’s College London, on the Strand.

Wild Court Reading Series Presents Kimberly Johnson
2025-01-21 18:30 - 20:00 | The River Room, Second Floor, King's Building - Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Join us for the fourth event in the Wild Court Reading Series.

For the event, we welcome celebrated US-based poet, translator and literary critic Kimberly Johnson, reading and in conversation with Dr Hannah Crawforth, Reader in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London.

Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, PMLA, and Modern Philology. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Hannah Crawforth is Reader in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, where her research is primarily concerned with the under-examined political, religious and literary implications of the history of the English language as it was studied in the Renaissance. She is also one of the four faculty members comprising the London Shakespeare Centre, launched at King’s in 2009, currently working on several collaborative projects.

This event will be held in the River Room, located on the second floor of King’s Building, King’s College London, on the Strand.

Entry is free, but please reserve your tickets in advance below, as space is limited.

Wild Court Reading Series Presents Sascha Akhtar
2025-03-27 18:00 - 20:00 | The Pyramid Room, Room K4U.04 Level 4, King's Building - Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Join us for the fifth event in the Wild Court Reading Series.

For this event, we welcome the acclaimed Pakistan-born poet and ‘Professor of Magic’ Sascha Akhtar reading and in conversation with poet, musician and King’s College London lecturer Anthony Joseph.

Sascha A. Akhtar has crafted seven metaphysical poetry collections, a short story collection Of Necessity And Wanting embracing social realism and a volume comprising a biography and first-time translations of Hijab Imtiazs’ little known manuscript Adab-E-Zareen (2023 Oxford University Press). Akhtar has received an Honorable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. Akhtar is a Poetry School tutor and lecturer at the University of Greenwich. She performs internationally, some highlights include the Emirates Festival of Literature and Rotterdam Poetry Festival. Latest writings appear in Fugitives and Futurists, Deleuzine, Shuddhashar, Rivista, the Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press), Of Myths and Mothers anthology and Lucy Writers Platform. Many (but not all) of her latest poetic works embrace many forms, including the moving image eschewing the ‘book’ or the ‘page’. These works are often found in anthologies. Her debut collection The Grimoire of Grimalkin (2007) was reissued by Prototype in 2024.

Dr Anthony Joseph FRSL is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022, described by judges as ‘A luminous collection which celebrates humanity in all its contradictions and breathes new lifePoetry, and shortlisted for the Forward Prize. Joseph’s 2018 novel Kitch was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. As a musician, he has released nine critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamblyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing and English at King’s College London.

This event will be held in the Pyramid Room, located on Level 4 of King’s Building, King’s College London, on the Strand.

Entry is free, but please reserve your tickets in advance below as space is limited.

Wild Court Reading Series Presents Stephen Watts
2026-03-24 18:00 - 19:30 | The Pyramid Room, Room K4U.04 Level 4, King's Building - Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Join us for the sixth event in the Wild Court Reading Series.

For this event, we welcome aclaimed poet, editor, translator and activist Stephen Watts, reading and in conversation with T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet and King’s College London lecturer, Anthony Joseph.

Stephen Watts’s most recent books are Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975-2005 (Prototype Publishing 2022, reprinted 2025) and Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds (Prototype 2020, reprinted 2025). A black and white, 75-minute film The Republics was made by Huw Wahl from the latter. Stephen’s A Book Of Drawn Poems was published by Sylvia Editions in December 2025 and The Language Of It (Shearsman) and Explosion Of Words: Poems 2006-2026 (Prototype) are both forthcoming. He also edited Swirl Of Words/Swirl Of Worlds: Poems in 94 Languages Spoken Across Hackney (Peer Gallery, 2022) and is much involved in the translation and co-translation of poetries as a vital language energy.

Dr Anthony Joseph FRSL is an award-winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022. Joseph’s 2018 novel Kitch was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award. As a musician, he has released nine critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamblyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing and English at King’s College London.

This event will be held in the Pyramid Room, located on Level 4 of King’s Building, King’s College London, on the Strand.

Entry is free, but please reserve your tickets in advance below as space is limited.
