The thirteenth in our Friday lunchtime reading series with David Bleiman, Emma Simon, Ruth Aylett and Paul Stephenson

Emma Simon has published two pamphlets: The Odds (Smith|Doorstop, 2020) and Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017). The Odds was a winner in the Poetry Business’s International Pamphlet and Book competition. She has been widely published in magazines and anthologies and has won both the Ver Poets and Prole Laureate prize and last year was a runner up in the Keats-Shelley Prize. She works in London as a part-time journalist and copywriter and is currently completing an MA in Writing Poetry, run by The Poetry School and Newcastle University.

David Bleiman writes out of Edinburgh in English, Scots, Spanish, Yiddish and a largely imagined dialect of Scots-Yiddish which won him the Sangschaw prize in 2020 for The Trebbler’s Tale. His first pamphlet, 'This Kilt of Many Colours', has just been published by Dempsey and Windle.

Ruth Aylett is a poet who lives and works in Edinburgh. Her pamphlet Pretty in Pink (2021, 4Word) explores the lives of women and their worlds, their triumphs and frustrations, their struggles and endurance. The range is wide, incorporating Rosa Luxemburg, dead bodies in sheds, Wythenshaw bubble-perms, hospitals and anti-Trump demonstrations. There is humour but also the difficulties of motherhood, acceptance, mental health, silencing of women, even rape and domestic murder. She is widely published in magazines (The North, Under the Radar, South Bank Review, Prole) and in anthologies (Mancunian Way, Scotia Extremis, Live Canon Christmas 2018) and her film poems appeared at the STanZA Poetry festival in 2021.

Paul Stephenson was a winner in the 2014/2015 Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet competition judged by US poet Billy Collins. His resulting first pamphlet ‘Those People‘ was published in May 2015 by Smith/Doorstop. His second pamphlet ‘The Days that Followed Paris‘, written in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks, was published by HappenStance in October 2016 and included as one of the Poetry School’s Books of the Year 2016. His third pamphlet ‘Selfie with Waterlilies‘ won the Paper Swans Press pamphlet competition and appeared in September 2017. He has published poems in journals including Magma, Poetry London, The Rialto, Bare Fiction and The Interpreter’s House, as well as the experimental anthology ‘Adventures in Form‘ (Penned in the Margins, 2012). He has reviewed for the The North, Sphinx and PN Review. He interviews poets about their first collections. He co-edited issue 70 of Magma on ‘Europe’, published in May 2018. He has co-curated Poetry in Aldeburgh since 2018 and teaches occasionally for the Poetry School.