Out-Spoken: September

Out-Spoken is the Southbank Centre’s resident poetry and live music night, bringing the hottest UK and international poets to perform alongside world-class musicians every month.

Each monthly gig is hosted by TS Eliot- and Polari Prize-winning poet Taylor, with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield spinning the best in reggae, soul and R&B throughout the evening.

This month’s edition features poetry from Leo Boix, Imtiaz Dharker, Sara Mansour and Jessica Traynor, and music from Simeon Hammond Dallas and Camden Stewart.

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet born in Argentina who lives in the UK. He’s the author of Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021) and Southernmost: Sonnets (2025), and the editor of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (2025).

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film-maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014. She was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University in 2020. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader.

Simeon Hammond Dallas’ music traverses genres and is described by Holler Country as ‘distinctly millennial take on Americana and blues, that sounds like Bonnie Raitt if her songs had been written by Alanis Morissette’.

Sara Mansour is a poet, practising lawyer, award-winning community leader, and co-founder and director of Bankstown Poetry Slam. In 2022, she founded the National Youth Poetry Slam in Australia and Muslim Agenda festival.

Camden Stewart is a British composer, pianist and operatic tenor of Ghanaian and Jamaican descent. His original work combines classical piano and voice with ambient textures and contemporary influences.

Jessica Traynor is a poet and poetry editor at Banshee. Her third collection, Pit Lullabies (2022) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times book of the year, a Guardian Best Read of 2022, and was shortlisted for the Yeats Society/Irish Independent Poetry Prize.

Presented in association with Out-Spoken.