ANDY WILLOUGHBY

Andy Willoughby is a poet, playwright and producer from the North-East of England and has published several books that draw on history, travel and mythologies both modern and ancient including Sampo: Heading Further North, Tough and The Wrong California. His work has been translated into Finnish, Estonian, Swedish, Dutch, Romanian and several other languages.  His work is included in “The Land of Three Rivers – an anthology of North East Poetry” (Bloodaxe Books). He performs his work nationally and internationally, usually with musicians, he was UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence in Tartu, Estonia in 2019. He is also a poetry promoter and organiser and has been instrumental in developing long-standing connections and exchanges between poets from the North East of England and other European countries, running successful spoken word cabarets for twenty years and co-organising the international poetry festival T-Junction in his hometown of Middlesbrough. He now lives in the ancient city of Durham. Andy’s last project Between Stations Live used multimedia, live and recorded music, spoken word, stand-up travelogue and documentary footage. Developed with Finnish and English musicians Anton Flint and Masi Hukari and UK film director Dan Perry based on Andy’s Between Stations – a critically acclaimed long poem (Smokestack Books, 2016), the show examines memories of a trip to Siberia with Finnish beat poets recalled while travelling through the remnants of the last steelworks of Teesside as he recovered from surgery for Thyroid cancer.