The final evening of this year’s Penarth Literary Festival sees the return of the hugely popular Poetry Showcase. This year the Showcase will be hosted by Cardiff-based poet, novelist and friend of the shop, Katherine Stansfield and will feature performances from Welsh poets clare e. potter, Taz Rahman and Rhian Elizabeth. Join us for a lively literary evening as we close the festival in suitably poetic style.

Our 2024 line-up:

Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. She has published two full length poetry collections and a pamphlet with Seren, the most recent of which is We Could Be Anywhere By Now. Katherine is also a novelist: her historical crime series Cornish Mysteries has won the Holyer an Gof Fiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Winston Graham Memorial Prize. She co-writes a fantasy crime trilogy with her partner David Towsey, publishing as D. K. Fields.

clare e. potter is a poet and radio presenter who studied and taught in The Deep South. She facilitates creative projects with community groups and is motivated by the belief that poetry can be a force for personal and social change. clare has had poetry residencies with the Landmark Trust, performed at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC and was a Hay Festival Writer at Work. She directed a BBC documentary (The Wall and the Mirror) about her village barber, thereafter a group formed to save the local miners’ institute. clare translated for the National Poet of Wales, Ifor ap Glyn and is working on a Welsh pamphlet. Healing the Pack is her second poetry collection.

Taz Rahman‘s first collection East of the Sun, West of the Moon was published by Seren Books in February this year. He has been extensively published in major UK poetry magazines since 2021. He was in the 2023 Hay Festival Writers at Work development scheme, Literature Wales’ 2021 annual writer development programme, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. He is an editor of the climate emergency journal Modron, serves at the reader’s committee chair for Poetry Wales magazine and founded Wales’ first Youtube poetry channel Just Another Poet.

Rhian Elizabeth is a trainee counsellor and a writer. She was born in 1988 in the Rhondda Valley, South Wales, and now lives in Cardiff. Her debut novel, Six Pounds Eight Ounces, was published in 2014 by Seren Books and is currently being adapted for TV, and her poetry collection, the last polar bear on earth, was published in 2018 by Parthian Books. Her prose and poetry have been listed in various competitions and prizes and appeared in many magazine and anthologies, as well as being featured on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. She was named by the welsh agenda as one of Wales’ Rising Stars- one of 30 people working to make Wales better over the next 30 years. She is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and Writer in Residence at the Coracle International Literary Festival in Trånas, Sweden. girls etc is her latest book of poems, published by Broken Sleep Books.