To celebrate the publication of a brand new set of works in collaboration with Rough Trade Books we present an evening with the authors and artists involved.

The William Morris Gallery and Rough Trade Books have worked together to create a series of pamphlets responding to, inspired by, or in dialogue with various elements of Morris’ work and life, from poetry to illustration, pattern-making, fiction, social commentary and typography, this series creates a contemporary context for some of the artistic, social and political ideas that fuelled Morris life and work.

On the night, we will have artists Nina Chakrabarti and Lola Lely discussing their pamphlet, which takes up William Morris’ ideas about beautiful or useful things, poet Will Burns who will read from Germ Songs—a collaborative work with the illustrator Jess White, which uses place and the close observation of the natural world as a starting point for a set of powerful poems and drawings, and Luke Turner and Eva Vermandel discussing their new work in which Turner’s fiction utilises Vermandel’s striking photographic sequence to trigger a story which both references and refreshes ideas from Morris’ News From Nowhere.

To complete the event, we will also have Timothy Donaldson—William Morris lookalike and the creator of Billy Mozz, the specially commissioned typeface of this collaborative series—performing his mesmerising large scale writing using his brush which will be scintillating in a miasma of ink upon the papered floor.