Carolyn Forché UK Tour, October 2026
'This is my first and will be my only selected poems, a gathering of fifty years, published on the anniversary of my first book.’ – Carolyn Forché, on Otherwhere
Carolyn Forché is one of America’s most important contemporary poets – renowned as a ‘poet of witness’ – as well as an indefatigable human rights activist. Over five decades, she has crafted visionary work that has reinvigorated poetry's power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, enquiries and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.
Her new retrospective, Otherwhere: New & Selected Poems 1976-2026, is published by Bloodaxe in October 2026, fifty years after her debut, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1975. It includes selections from that book and from four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: The Country Between Us (1981/2019), The Angel of History (1994), Blue Hour (2003) and In the Lateness of the World (2021), and opens with If there is ink, a group of 16 new poems.
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Otherwhere: New & Selected Poems 1976-2026 was given a wonderful review online in The Guardian of 2 October 2026. Read the feature here.
‘A landmark retrospective spanning five collections across five decades, this impressive volume opens with an eloquent preface, Older Than Glass, Younger Than Music, which delineates Forché’s poetics. What is remarkable about her work is a visionary ability to merge poems of personal intimacy with geopolitical realities, distinguishing her as a “poet of witness”. War, displacement and genocide are juxtaposed with elegiac meditations’ – Jennifer Lee Tsai, The Guardian (Best recent poetry round-up)
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Carolyn Forché is on tour in the UK in October 2026 to launch Otherwhere at a series of in-person readings in the North of England: Newcastle Poetry Festival, Hebden Bridge, Manchester Literature Festival, and Sheffield's Off the Shelf Festival of Words. More details below.
UK TOUR: 3-17 OCTOBER 2026
Newcastle Poetry Festival
Saturday 3 October, 6pm-8.30pm
Griffin Gala: Rachael Boast, Carolyn Forché, Sarah Howe, Roger Reeves & Aleš Šteger
Rachael Boast is a poet, editor and disability advocate. Her fifth poetry collection, Volvelle, was published by Picador in July 2026. She won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2011 and has been shortlisted for the Griffin Prize (2014) and the T.S. Eliot Prize (2016). She edited the 2025 Bloodaxe Books anthology Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets.
Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit in 1950. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), drew on her experiences in El Salvador. Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993), remains a classic text. Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026 is published by Bloodaxe in October.
Sarah Howe is a Hong Kong-born poet and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second collection, Foretokens, was shortlisted for both the T.S.Eliot and Forward prizes. She is Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus.
Roger Reeves is the author of the award-winning Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (2023) and the poetry collection Best Barbarian (2022), which received the 2023 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Aleš Šteger is a poet and prose writer from Ljubljana, Slovenia, whose books have been translated into over 20 languages. His latest publication in English is Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems, published by Bloodaxe in 2023.
More details and booking here.
Three readings by Carolyn Forché & Kwame Dawes
Presented by Bloodaxe Books with Renaissance One
Sunday 11 October, 7.30pm: HEBDEN BRIDGE
UNSPEAKABLE: An Evening With Carolyn Forché and Kwame Dawes
Wainsgate Chapel, Wainsgate, Hebden Bridge HX7 8SU
Entry: £17. Tickets & event information here.
Friday 16 October, 6.30pm: MANCHESTER
Manchester Literature Festival: Carolyn Forché & Kwame Dawes
Manchester Central Library
Entry: £12 / £10
Tickets & event information here. (Phone bookings: 0161 876 2015)
Saturday 17 October, 5pm: SHEFFIELD
Off the Shelf Festival of Words - Poetry of Resistance and Transcendence: Carolyn Forché & Kwame Dawes
Showroom Cinema, Sheffield
Entry: £14/£12
Tickets & event information here. (Phone bookings: 0114 249 6000)
JOINT ONLINE LAUNCH READING
Tuesday 20 October 2026, 7pm BST (YouTube Live)
Bloodaxe online launch reading with Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell
Do join Bloodaxe for this international online launch event for our new October titles. Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley will be joined by Jane Clarke, Carolyn Forché and Chase Twichell. All three poets will be reading live from their new poetry books, followed by a discussion about their work.
This free Bloodaxe launch event will be streamed on YouTube Live on this YouTube page: https://youtube.com/live/p1cB6hjTCeY
If you register to attend on TicketTailor you will receive an event link reminder by email by midday the day before the event.
For those who can't make it live, the reading will be available on YouTube afterwards below or via the same YouTube link: https://youtube.com/live/p1cB6hjTCeY
[11 September 2026]
