This event is in collaboration with Nine Arches Press presenting two wonderful poets! Rosie Garland with her latest collection This Is How I Fight  which encounters the wild and untamed, the creatures of night – and the beasts that lurk within us. Gregory Leadbetter with In The Infernal Garden, leading us into dark and verdant places of the imagination, the edge of the wild where the human meets the more-than-human in the burning green fuse of the living world. Rosie and Gregory will be in conversation with Nine Arches Press editor, Jane Commane.

Rosie Garland writes poetry, long and short fiction, and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Her most recent novel The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates, and her short fiction is collected in Your Sons & Your Daughters Are Beyond (Fly On The Wall Press). Her new poetry collection This is How I Fight (Nine Arches Press) is out now.  

In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, & Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today. 

Gregory Leadbetter’s new collection of poetry is The Infernal Garden (Nine Arches Press, 2025). His previous books and pamphlets include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023); Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020); The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). His work for the BBC includes the extended poem  Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book  Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. 

Jane Commane is editor at Birmingham-based poetry publisher Nine Arches Press, and co-editor of Under the Radar, a magazine of new writing. Jane is also a poet and author of Assembly Lines (Bloodaxe, 2018) and co-author of How to be a Poet. She is a Writing West Midlands Room 204 Writer, a Jerwood Compton Fellow and was awarded The Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2025.

This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Grants Funding through Arts Council England.