Sarah-Clare's Literary Salon

For Chorlton Arts Festival, writer, editor and critic Sarah-Clare Conlon will invite guests to share their work past, present and future, and chat about their practice and processes in poetry and prose. Get a peek behind the writing curtain and take away top tips, from approaching the blank page to what to add to your TBR pile.

The guests for this unique #CAF2026 event are: Nóra Blascsók, Tom Branfoot, David Gaffney and Jazmine Linklater.

HOST

Sarah-Clare Conlon founded Manchester’s award-winning spoken word night Verbose and has been writer-in-residence at Victoria Baths, Saul Hay Gallery and Ilkley Literature Festival, the north of England’s longest-running literature festival. Nominated for the Wainwright Prize, her latest pamphlet Wanderland (Red Ceilings Press) was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2025 Listing. It follows Lune, Using Language and cache-cache, plus prose collection Marine Drive (Broken Sleep Books). Her work has appeared recently in The Manchester Review, Long Poem Magazine, aswirl and Blackbox Manifold, and she reviews for PN Review and The North.

GUESTS

Hungarian poet Nóra Blascsók is a current Manchester Multilingual City Poet and a 2025 New Northern Poet. Her debut pamphlet of work was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. Her most recent poems can be found in The Poetry Review, Propel and Perverse. She has performed her work in the UK and abroad, including at literature festivals in Manchester, Ilkley and Barcelona.

Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Writers' Award in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. He is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His poem ‘A Parliament of Jets’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2025. Volatile, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming with The 87 Press.

David Gaffney lives in Manchester. He is the author of three novels, six short story collections, and two graphic novels with artist Dan Berry. His short story collection Concrete Fields (Salt Publishing, 2023) was longlisted for the Edgehill Short Story Prize and his latest collection of experimental prose, Lakes of Titan, is out now on Above/Ground press. He devises and delivers live literature commissioning projects, most recently Tootally Wired, for Manchester Histories Festival, and the music and spoken word event Sleeve Notes at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. He is also a senior manager for literature at Arts Council England.

Based in Manchester, Jazmine Linklater has published four pamphlets, most recently Snagged on red thread, a long poem published by Monitor Books in October 2025. It follows Toward Passion According (Zarf, 2017), Découper, Coller (Dock Road, 2018) and Figure a Motion (Guillemot, 2020), and precedes a full collection, due out next year. Until recently head of marketing and events at Carcanet Press, she is a regional editor for online art writing platform Corridor8 and is pursuing a practice-based PhD at the University of Sheffield, researching art writing and ekphrastic encounters.

Sarah-Clare's Literary Salon is a free event taking place during Chorlton Arts Festival 2026 – there will be books for sale, so come appropriately furnished!

Doors are 5.45pm for a sharp 6pm start. Sarah-Clare's Literary Salon will end by 7.30pm, after which you are welcome to stay on for readings from The Aftershock Review. A poetry double bill, if you will!

(Photo credit: Sabine Dundure)