Penned in the Margins

Penned in the Margins Penned in the Margins creates publications and performances for people who are not afraid to take risks.

We believe in the power of language to challenge how we think, test new ideas and explore alternative stories. We operate across the arts, collaborating with writers, artists and creative partners using new platforms and technologies. "Penned in the Margins is a marvellously exciting venture, always bringing together the worlds of experimentalism and performance, always looking for new ways to pre

sent the spoken word in a time of artistic flux. The mainstream will, in the future, be redefined and enriched by companies like Penned in the Margins." Ian McMillan

"Good news for poetry"
The Times

"The Brian Eno of poetry publishing"
Selected Poems

"An extraordinary odyssey"
Julian Sands, BBC Radio 4 on Kalagora

"At the forefront of exploring what live literature, spoken word – whatever you wish to call it – can and could be"
Natasha Tripney, The Stage

"A thoroughly original, ingenious one-man production. It remains the most mesmerising play I have had the pleasure of seeing”
Broadway Baby on Kalagora

"The experimentation iis amazing to watch. This show makes the audience feel in a way that most theatre doesn’t." A Younger Theatre on Electronic Voice Phenomena

"Cracking (and frequently cutting-edge) live literature events"
Londonist

"Exactly the kind of work that needs to be done ... neither declarative nor factional"
SJ Fowler

"Cerebral not stuffy"
The Times

On this day in 2012 we published Adventures in Form. Still one of our bestselling books, it introduced a multitude of ne...
01/04/2026

On this day in 2012 we published Adventures in Form. Still one of our bestselling books, it introduced a multitude of new & unusual poetic forms – from tweet to time-splice, from skinny villanelle to breakbeat sonnet 📚

Copies are available from our website!

Can you believe it’s 7 years today since we released the remarkable WITCH by ? 🎉 🌋 Enjoy these shots from the launch par...
20/03/2026

Can you believe it’s 7 years today since we released the remarkable WITCH by ? 🎉 🌋

Enjoy these shots from the launch party 🍷

“WITCH is sexy, frightening and cerebral.” Katherine Angel

🚨 Our Black Friday book sale is now open with 50% off all titles while stocks last. Visit pennedinthemargins.co.uk📚 Awar...
26/11/2025

🚨 Our Black Friday book sale is now open with 50% off all titles while stocks last. Visit pennedinthemargins.co.uk

📚 Award-winning , fresh and adventurous yours for less than the cost of a pint 🍺

✍️ Our authors include ._hopkins .overall .evansbush

📦 Free delivery for orders over £25. We deliver to UK and internationally excluding EU.

🛑 Sale ends at midnight on Monday 1 December.

Who did it spookier? 👻 🕸️ L-R🪦 Chris McCabe communing with dead poets in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, 2016 (photo by Har...
31/10/2025

Who did it spookier? 👻 🕸️

L-R

🪦 Chris McCabe communing with dead poets in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, 2016 (photo by Harpreet Kalsi)

😈 Michael Wagg as Satan in Fair Field at Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2017 (photo by Graeme Braidwood)

💀Steven J Fowler performing a skeleton’s first meal as part of Electronic Voice Phenomena at Shoreditch Town Hall, 2015

👿 Michael Oku & Francesca Millican-Slater as two of the Seven Sins in Fair Field at Ledbury Poetry Festival, 2017 (photo by Graeme Braidwood)

On this day four years ago won the Forward Prize for Best Collection for his ‘consistently entertaining’ (TLS) book Not...
24/10/2025

On this day four years ago won the Forward Prize for Best Collection for his ‘consistently entertaining’ (TLS) book Notes on the Sonnets 🎭

Luke Kennard recasts Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets as a series of anarchic prose poems set in the same joyless house party.
A physicist explains dark matter in the kitchen. A crying man is consoled by a Sigmund Freud action figure. An out-of-hours doctor sells phials of dark red liquid from a briefcase. Someone takes out a guitar.
Wry, insolent and self-eviscerating, Notes on the Sonnets riddles the Bard with the anxieties of the modern age, bringing Kennard’s affectionate critique to subjects as various as love, marriage, God, metaphysics and a sad horse.

❤️🤍🖤

🌊 WE RECOMMEND: spoken word and music inspired by the Thames and the mudlarks who search its riverbed at low tide.While ...
18/09/2025

🌊 WE RECOMMEND: spoken word and music inspired by the Thames and the mudlarks who search its riverbed at low tide.

While Tides Rise & Fall
Two Temple Place, London
Tue 23rd Sep 2025
7pm - 9:30pm
£15 (£10 concessions)

In the stunning setting of a neo-Gothic mansion on the banks of the Thames, poets, musicians and mudlarks combine to tell stories of the river, the mud of the riverbed and the bridges that span it.

Immerse yourself in this timeless and magical landscape in a special event at one of Two Temple Place, one of London’s hidden architectural gems. is the first poet to be appointed to celebrate London’s bridges in verse; she performs new poems inspired by the iconic bridges that span the river, as well as by the mudlarks who search the riverbed at low tide. Novelist and Thames mudlark shares her passion for discovering things from the Thames and reads from her children’s adventure story Hidden Treasure. Actor, detectorist and mudlark Ken Collard tells unusual . And poet and artist Abondance Matanda performs a new commission inspired by a West African power figure – a Nkisi Kozo – found in the river by mudlark Nicola White; she draws on her Congolese heritage to trace this beguiling object’s journey across the ocean. Curated and hosted by mudlark and author of London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City, Tom Chivers (), and all woven together by riotously joyful songs by Gwena Harman and Sonny Brazil of folk collective Goblin Band.

🌊

Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. Lost & Found is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund. Thanks to National Lottery players, we have been able to reveal untold maritime histories of Greenwich and Deptford.

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne 🌞On this day in 2017 - 8 years ago! - our site-specific reimagining of the me...
30/06/2025

In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne 🌞

On this day in 2017 - 8 years ago! - our site-specific reimagining of the medieval epic poem Piers Plowman opened on the misty top of the Malvern Hill as part of festival ⛰️ ✨

Written almost 650 years ago by William Langland, Piers Plowman enters the mind of a wanderer, Will, as he falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, dreams of a ‘fair field full of folk’ and embarks on a quest to find Truth. Conceived and produced by multi-award-winning arts company Penned in the Margins, Fair Field re-imagined Piers Plowman for the twenty-first century through site-responsive performances, an exhibition at the National Poetry Library, podcasts, educational workshops and more. Fair Field invites you to enter the psychedelic dreamscape of Piers Plowman — to explore a world of inequality, political corruption and spiritual crisis that is uncannily like our own.

👉 thisfairfield.com

On this day in 2019 site-specific installation Brine Field by Thomas Pearson () opened at 🏗️ 🍃 An installation embedded...
25/05/2025

On this day in 2019 site-specific installation Brine Field by Thomas Pearson () opened at 🏗️ 🍃

An installation embedded in the industrial landscape around Billingham, Teesside. Poems and sculptural monuments set in the reclaimed marshland of RSPB Saltholme respond to the submerged histories of this remarkable environment.

Commissioned by Penned in the Margins for Edgelandia. Supported by the River Tees Rediscovered Landscape Partnership, thanks to money raised by National Lottery players and awarded through the National Lotterary Heritage Fund.

On this day in 2014 we presented a scratch performance of The Shroud, written and performed by Siddhartha Bose with Avae...
09/05/2025

On this day in 2014 we presented a scratch performance of The Shroud, written and performed by Siddhartha Bose with Avaes Mohammed.

✨

The Shroud is a two-man, miniature epic about loss, time and the things that connect us. A father writes letters to his homesick son. A Kolkata potter shapes clay goddesses from the silt of the Ganges. A young man circles the funeral pyre.

Drawing on Hindu myth, memories and personal letters, The Shroud is composed as a series of interweaving dialogues between the poets and theatre-makers Siddhartha Bose and Avaes Mohammad. The ancient and the modern combine to create an inventive, quietly beautiful meditation on death, ritual, fathers and sons.

Writer: Siddhartha Bose
Performers: Siddhartha Bose, Avaes Mohammad
Director: Russell Bender
Devised by Bose, Bender & Mohammad
Scenographer: Rajha Shakiry
Sound design: Ed Lewis
Lighting design: Charlie Lucas
Featuring music by Susheela Raman
Producer: Tom Chivers

Thanks to Rich Mix, The Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival, Arts Admin. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Published on this day in 2012: Adventures in Form ✍️ 🎉 Discover a multitude of new and unusual poetic forms – from tweet...
01/04/2025

Published on this day in 2012: Adventures in Form ✍️ 🎉

Discover a multitude of new and unusual poetic forms – from tweet to time-splice, and from skinny villanelle to breakbeat sonnet – in this inspiring and inventive anthology.
Welcome to a strange new world in which a poem can be written using only one vowel, processed through computer code, collaged from film trailers, compiled from Facebook status updates, hidden inside a Sudoku puzzle, and even painted on sheep to demonstrate Quantum Theory.
Adventures in Form features over ninety poems by forty-six contributors including Patience Agbabi, Christian Bök, Joe Dunthorne, Inua Ellams, Roddy Lumsden, Ian McMillan, Paul Muldoon, Ruth Padel and Hannah Silva. Edited and introduced by Tom Chivers.

❤️🤍🖤

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Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street
London
E16AB

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