Speaking Back

Last year we introduced Speaking Back for the first time, pairing four spoken word artists and four short films with some beautiful and surprising results.

The event returns for Flatpack 2025, with a twist. Our four poets have had the opportunity to delve into the Stuart Hall Archive at the University of Birmingham, exploring Hall’s kaleidoscopic ideas on art, subcultures, the media, language and much more besides. For the festival each will perform their own creative response to something they’ve encountered in the collection, or to a relevant piece of archival film.

The poets:

Zakariye Abdillahi is a poet, playwright and filmmaker. He is currently a roundhouse resident artist at Birmingham Hippodrome.

Steven Camden (aka Polarbear) is a poet and writer. His books for young adults include Tape and It’s About Love, and his most recent poetry collection is The Last Chronicle (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Ashlee Elizabeth-Lolo is a poet, dramaturg and broadcaster with a regular spot on Switch Radio.

Bohdan Piasecki is a poet and professor of creative writing with a particular interest in multilingualism and translation.

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