Colpitts Poetry: Julie Egdell and Andy Willoughby

Two stunning stage presences from the North East!

Julie Egdell is an acclaimed poet and performer from Whitley Bay, renowned for her fierce lyric intelligence, emotional candour and hypnotic stage presence. Her multimedia spoken-word show and book (Smokestack 2017) Alice in Winterland re-imagines Alice through the lens of an unruly old Soviet cartoon character, shifting between her native Tyneside and St Petersburg where she taught English.

The show shifts kaleidoscopically, mashing up poetry, storytelling, live performance, film and a specially composed musical sountrack, moving between surreal dark humour and raw intimacy to examine displacement, identity, cultural exile and personal memory. Alice in Winterland is bold, haunting and unforgettable.

Andy Willoughby is an internationally recognised poet, playwright and producer from the North East of England, acclaimed for his tender lyricism, tough humour and magnetic performance style. His spoken-word show Between Stations (book: Smokestack 2016) juxtaposes a short train journey across Teesside on a post-cancer-surgery winter day with memories of an epic, chaotic journey deep into Siberia with Finnish poets.

Blending poetry from the book, storytelling, live performance, film by Dan Perry and an original music soundtrack by Masi Hukari and Anton Flint, the show constantly switches tracks between bleak comedy and aching tenderness, exploring post-industrial reality, love, survival, and working-class and personal history in a post-Beat travelogue – a wild ride through space and time.