To an Unknown Receiver: Erica Hesketh in conversation with Will Harris

Tues 6 October 6:30-9pm Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation spanning the climate crisis, art, war and other human legacies, as Erica Hesketh reads from her new pamphlet To an Unknown Receiver: Sonnets & Cascades (Guillemot Press) and discusses it with poet and writer Will Harris. To an Unknown Receiver is a love-letter, an elegy and a time capsule. Over the course of fourteen sonnets, Hesketh considers humanity’s dazzling creativity and capacity for hope alongside the grievous harms we have perpetrated, both to the planet and to one another – ‘the brave / mad wreckage of our species’. Then, in five ‘cascades’, she remixes her ideas, sifting through the available language again and again to find new meaning. Erica Hesketh’s debut collection In the Lily Room was published by Nine Arches Press in 2025. She is the editor of Living in Language: International reflections for the practising poet (Poetry Translation Centre, 2024) and co-author with Laura Sampson of Moon, Snow, Blossom: Wintry Tales from Across Japan (Elliott & Thompson, forthcoming in 2026). From 2016 to 2024 she was director of the Poetry Translation Centre, and she is currently artistic director of the Winchester Poetry Festival. Originally from Japan and Denmark, she now lives in London with her partner and child. Will Harris is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) (winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta and Wesleyan University Press, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula Press, 2018). Siblings, a conversation between Jay Bernard, Mary Jean Chan, Will Harris and Nisha Ramayya, was published by Monitor Books in 2024. Will helps facilitate the Southbank New Poets Collective with Vanessa Kisuule, and is the RLF Fellow in the Department of Allied Health at London South Bank University. He is currently working on a project about social care.