Poetry Art Politics Community
Torriano Meeting House is a user-funded grass-roots volunteer-run arts and community organisation in Kentish Town. We are best known for our poetry events but we have many other long running strands including storytelling for adults, writing and storytelling workshops, hosting local political campaigning groups, theatrical events, left wing folk club, and we very much support grass-roots creativity and social change.
Torriano is a space for you to organise events and projects.
“What is the purpose of resisting corporate globalization if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the unmanageable, the local, the poetic and the eccentric? So they need to be practiced, celebrated and studied too, right now.” – Rebecca Solnit
Jacqueline Saphra is a poet, playwright and activist. Her second collection, All My Mad Mothers was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and her most recent one is One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets (both from Nine Arches Press). Her next collection, Velvel’s Violin will be out from Nine Arches Press in July 2023. She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and teaches for The Poetry School.
Sue Johns originates from Cornwall where she started performing as a punk poet, in the 1980’s. She has published 3 pamphlets and 2 full collections, the most recent Hush (Morgan’s Eye Press 2011) , Rented, Poems on Prostitution and Dependency (Palewell Press, 2018) and a new pamphlet Track Record (Dempsey & Windle, 2021). Sue has also written and performed theatrical monologues and worked on numerous art/poetry collaborations
Anne Rouse’s fifth collection, Ox-Eye, was published by Bloodaxe in 2022, appearing 14 years after her previous book, her retrospective The Upshot: New and Selected Poems. That book included the new poems of The Divided (2008), along with selections from her first three critically acclaimed earlier collections, Sunset Grill (1993) and Timing(1997) – both Poetry Book Society Recommendations – and The School of Night (2004), and was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2008. Born in Washington DC and raised in Virginia, she became a UK citizen, settling in East Sussex after many years in London. A former health worker, she has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Glasgow (2000-02), Queen’s University, Belfast (2004-05), and the Courtauld Institute, London (2008). Her short plays have been given rehearsed readings in Edinburgh and Hastings in the UK and in Virginia in the US. You can find her on Twitter @rouseanne.
Torriano Meeting House 