Unsafe by Karen McCarthy Woolf.
Whether it's via tattoos, trees or the totemic quality of cats, London-based poet Karen McCarthy Woolf explores the processes of gentrification and class division. A moving, critical and highly intuitive epic weaving together poetry, documentary and lyric essay, Unsafe is an interrogation of what it means to be a citizen and a testimony to the remaining spaces we can call free.
Join us for an evening of readings from Karen McCarthy Woolf, a conversation between Woolf and poet, Kayo Chingonyi. Plus a screening from Venezuelan animation collective MECHA, produced in collaboration with The Poetry Society.
Join us for an evening of readings from Karen McCarthy Woolf, a conversation between Woolf and poet, Kayo Chingonyi. Plus a screening from Venezuelan animation collective MECHA, produced in collaboration with The Poetry Society.
Bios
Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL, born in London to English and Jamaican parents is a poet, editor, essayist and librettist. Her début An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year and her verse novel Top Doll was shortlisted for the T S Eliot and Jhalak Prizes. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA she was the inaugural poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. In 2025, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England).
Unsafe was produced in collaboration with The Poetry Society and the Venezuelan animation collective MECHA, and commissioned by 1418NOW as a follow-up to Unwritten, a project exploring the Caribbean engagement in the First World War, which explored barbed wire as a material object.
Kayo Chingonyi FRSL was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry and of The Civitella Ranieri Foundation. In 2012, he was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by The Poetry Society and was Associate Poet at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 2015. His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award. Kayo was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester before joining Durham University as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing. He is a writer and presenter for the music and culture podcast Decode on Spotify, poetry editor at Bloomsbury, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
07:00 pm
Thu, 16 Apr 2026
Cinema 2
Ticket information
- All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
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Access information
Cinema 2
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
- We have a removable seat to create a wheelchair allocated space, please contact to organise this prior to the date and time of the screening
- We have unassigned seating. If you require a specific seat, please reserve this in advance
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