SoapBox poetry with Salena Godden

Join SoapBox for this unique evening of funny, fearless and joyful spoken word featuring award-winning novelist, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage – the formidable Salena Godden, who is in Ipswich for the first time.

Also joining Salena are some of the finest local poets in support, including Ipswich’s own Jackie Montague. Hosted by Amy Wragg.

All tickets just £15.

Free handmade zine for all ticket holders, collection upon arrival.

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning novelist, poet and broadcaster of mixed Jamaican-Irish heritage. Her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, was published by Canongate in 2021, won the Indie Book Awards for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. The hardback edition of Pessimism is for Lightweights, 30 pieces of courage and resistance was published by Rough Trade Books in 2023. The title poem is on permanent display at The Peoples History Museum, Manchester. A new full poetry collection With Love, Grief and Fury and literary childhood memoir Springfield Road – A Poets Childhood Revisited were published together with Canongate in 2024. A live performance from With Love, Grief and Fury was recorded at Out-Spoken at the Southbank and broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s The Verb and Pick of The Week.

With Love, Grief and Fury features her poem Tell Good People Good Things, which was displayed in the Poetry & Resistance exhibition at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and While Justice Waits which was highly commended by the Forward Prize. A gorgeous paperback edition of With Love, Grief and Fury will be published in October 2025. Salena Godden is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Patron of Hastings Book Festival and an Honorary Fellow of West Dean, Sussex.