Live Poetry at Riverhouse, our monthly series bringing poets of national standing to the warm, intimate setting of the Barn stage, returns with more guest poets reading and discussing their work, plus the ever popular Open Mic spots, where you have the chance to read your own work to a friendly, appreciative audience! The evenings are once again hosted by Riverhouse Poets tutor Katie Griffiths.
This month, Katie will be in conversation with headliners Charlotte Ansell whose most recent book Amittere was longlisted in the prestigious Forward Prizes, and Martyn Crucefix whose literary career has brought accolades and awards not just for original poems but also translations.
Charlotte Ansell is a creative writing facilitator who lives in Rochester. Her third collection Deluge was a 2019 PBS Winter recommendation and her fourth Amittere (2025) was longlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies. Charlotte received an RSL- Literature Matters Award in 2020 and in 2025 she was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize and won The Curae Poetry Prize. In 2026 she came 2nd in the Saolta Arts Poems for Patience competition. She founded and co-runs Common Ground, a local poetry collective in Kent.
Martyn Crucefix‘s most recent poetry collections are Our Weird Regiment (Shearsman, 2026), Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023), and Cargo of Limbs (Hercules Editions, 2019). His translations of the poems of Peter Huchel, These Numbered Days, (Shearsman, 2019), won the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, 2020. Change Your Life, a major selection of Rainer Maria Rilke poems, translated by Martyn, is published by Pushkin Press (2024) and his most recent translation publication is Jurgen Becker’s Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium (Shearsman, 2026). Until recently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The British Library, Martyn’s blog can be found here: http://www.martyncrucefix.com
Katie Griffiths is author of The Attitudes and the prize-winning My Shrink is Pregnant. She came second in 2018’s National Poetry Competition, and in 2024 won the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. Her next book Mindset Mindrise is due from Nine Arches Press in autumn 2026. She regularly mentors, and leads poetry workshops including here at Riverhouse.