Writers Kingston event #92 :
Poem Brut October Thursday 9th 2025
Kingston University Town House
Join us for an event of unique and various literary performances involving staff, students and alumni of Kingston University alongside visiting writers, artists and musicians from across the UK and beyond. Poem Brut is an event series that embraces aesthetic possibility and all possible artistic poetic methods of writing, making and presenting poetry, and for this night those methods will be truly expansive. MIYA visits from Tokyo, presenting improvisation, while Stephen Sunderland launches his groundbreaking surrealist novel ‘The Cinema Beneath the Lake’, amongst many others. Both the Popogrou and IPLA collectives present collaborative performances while students from the ‘Experiments and Innovations’ module at KU present new live works. This will be an energising evening of live literature celebrating the Writers Kingston community, nearing 100 events since 2017.
Students of the ‘Experiments and Innovations’ module : Nadia Jordan, Mia Hale-McLeod and Cerys McVea
Stephen Sunderland launches his novel, ‘The Cinema Beneath the Lake’
Miya, visiting from Japan
Julia Rose Lewis, visiting from the United States
Nikolai Duffy pre-launches his novel, ‘Common’
IPLA Collective : Eleanor Wilders, Danica Ignacio, Cameron Wade
Popogrou Collective : Bob T Bright, Vicki Kaye, Patrick Cosgrove and Simon Tyrrell
Lily Ferret and Bella Weerasinghe
The Cinema Beneath the Lake by Stephen Sunderland Cast as a medium for the Surrealists, Suzanne dreams her own revolution. Summoning a band of impossible adventurers, she journeys toward the “Méduse” — the cinema beneath Lake Pavin — which will project their film-dreams to the clouds as riddling clues to our resolution in the world. The Cinema Beneath the Lake is a secret history of Surrealism, drawn from the hidden life of the Muse.
Common, by Nikolai Duffy, tells the story of Robert, who in the aftermath of his aunt's death, travels from his home in Manchester to Hampshire to settle her affairs. In her house, faced with the left-behind detritus of an eccentric life, Robert makes the decision to leave his family and build a hut on the local common. This is a novel that explores death, memory, the long impact of brutality in childhood, and Robert's aunt's insistence that a person should live an 'unroofed life'.