Sounds Poetic
Join us on Saturday, 2nd August at the beautiful St Margaret’s Church, Warnham — the very place where Percy Bysshe Shelley was baptised — for a magical evening of verse, voice, and melody.
The event will feature performances from award-winning poets and musicians: Sasha Dugdale, John McCullough, Barry Smith and Linda Kelsall-Barnett.
We’ll also be unveiling the winning poems from the Shelley Memorial Project 2025 International Poetry Competition, presented by none other than Joe Bunn – the Bard of Worthing! Doors will open at 6:30 PM and the event begins at 7:00 PM sharp.
Sasha Dugdale
Tickets are now available — grab yours here.
Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator and former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published by Carcanet in 2024 and won the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Prize. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes.
She won a Forward Prize for her long poem Joy, a monologue in the voice of Catherine, William Blake’s widow. Dugdale's translations from Russian have been shortlisted for the International Booker, the James Tait Black Prize and Warwick Prize for Women’s Writing, amongst others. Her translation of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory won the MLA Lois Roth Award.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
John McCullough
John McCullough lives in Hove. His first collection of poems, The Frost Fairs, was published by Salt in 2011 and won the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Book of the Year in The Independent as well as a summer read in The Observer. Spacecraft, his second collection, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2016 and shortlisted for the Ledbury-Forte Prize as well as being a summer read in The Guardian. John’s third book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 2019) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His fourth collection, Panic Response (Penned in the Margins, 2022), was a Book of the Year for The Telegraph and one of The Times’ Notable New Poetry Books of 2022. The collection’s long poem, ‘Flower of Sulphur’, was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.
John is a Senior Lecturer in creative writing at the University of Brighton as well as teaching on poetry for organizations including the Arvon Foundation and the online Creative Writing Programme.
Barry Smith is a performance poet and director of the South Downs Poetry Festival. Barry was runner-up in a BBC Proms Poetry Competition and shortlisted for the Bread & Roses Songwriting and Spoken Word Award, 2021. His collection, Performance Rites, was published by Waterloo Press in 2021 He has just launched his latest collection, Reeling and Writhing , inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice Books. He is, of course, also patron of the Shelley Memorial Project!
Linda Kelsall-Barnett and Barry Smith
Linda Kelsall-Barnett first learned guitar with Richard Stephenson and Brian Cornwell, both based around Chichester. After attending Chichester High School for Girls she continued her studies at Southampton University, graduating with a degree in English and Music, while also studying guitar with Julian Byzantine and Carlos Bonell in London. She returned to Chichester to teach guitar and currently teaches at Westbourne House and Bishop Luffa schools and has a thriving private teaching practice. She has given many solo recitals locally including an annual event for the Festival of Chichester. She is a long-standing member of the West Sussex Guitar Club, which meets regularly at the Regis School of Music and she directs the West Sussex Guitar Club Orchestra.