STORIE: EXPERIMENTS IN PROSE

Join us for the final STORIE of 2025 & hear from an absolutely electric line-up of writers including author & translator POLLY BARTON, novelist & publisher TARIQ GODDARD, writer & performance artist SOPHIE SLEIGH-JOHNSON & Birmingham-based spoken word artist & musician KESOMI.

POLLY BARTON is a Japanese translator & writer. Her translations include ‘Where the Wild Ladies Are’ & ‘The Woman Dies’ by Aoko Matsuda, ‘Hunchback’ by Saou Ichikawa, ‘There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job’ by Kikuko Tsumura, & ‘Mild Vertigo’ by Mieko Kanai. Her translation of Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’ was named Waterstones Book of the Year 2024. She is the author of ‘Fifty Sounds’ & ‘Porn: An Oral History’.

TARIQ GODDARD is the author of seven novels including his 2002 debut, the Whitbread (latterly Costa) Prize shortlisted ‘Homage to a Firing Squad’ & 2017’s ‘Nature and Necessity’. He has been nominated for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, & the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize & has co-edited two collections of essays, ‘The Repeater Book of the Occult’ & ‘The Repeater Book of Heroism’. His last book ‘High John the Conqueror’ was published by Repeater Books in 2022.

SOPHIE SLEIGH-JOHNSON is a Southend-on-Sea-based writer. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, where she now teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her performance work, comprising sound collage & spoken word with printmaking props, occasions numerous performances both nationally and internationally. She writes for publications including the Darkside, the Leigh Times, & the London Drinker.

KESOMI (aka OLLY FORRESTER) is a writer, spoken word artist & drummer based in Bournville, Birmingham. His work combines tragi-comic storytelling with intricate, electronic soundscapes. As one half of playwright duo Forrester & Fletcher, his play 'Banterworks' was shortlisted for BBC Writersroom 'Script Room Drama', while his recent comedy sketches co-written with Georgia Tuohey have featured on BBC Upload & been recognised by London's Chorts! Awards. As a drummer, he has played over 100 gigs in venues ranging from shoddy boozers to Shepherd's Bush Empire. Emerging from behind the cymbals, Kesomi "cuts in, scalpel-like on the fault lines of modern masculinity".

TICKETS: Free

Please reserve your ticket here on our Eventbrite page.

KILDER BAR is located at 5 Shaw’s Passage, Digbeth with step-free access via the entrance on Shaw’s Passage.

For further enquiries about the event, please email storie@vocebooks.com