Next month will see two very special poetry events take place at The Coronet Theatre on Notting Hill Gate. The first will see Poetry Club take place on 4th June 2026, with readings from three award-winning contemporary poets – Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh and Isabelle Baafi. Later in the month, from 19th – 21st June 2026, Dead Poets Live will see actor and theatre-maker Simon McBurney exploring the life of British poet Basil Bunting, performing his long poem Brigflatts sixty years after its first publication.
Poetry Club, 4th June – Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh & Isabelle Baafi
The work of these three contemporary female poets, Tishani Doshi, Asmaa Azaizeh and Isabelle Baafi, explores how language bears witness to the pressures of our time, questioning conflict, identity and belonging, intimate histories and acts of personal transformation.
Tishani Doshi will be reading from her new collection Egrets, While War. With birds as messengers and witnesses, from mythic creatures of ancient epics to the everyday city pigeon, Doshi’s poems offer a meditation on survival, of species, history, and the heart.
Palestinian poet Asmaa Azaizeh will be reading a selection of recent, unpublished poems exploring genocide and witnessed war, as well as reflecting on recent migration and the experience of motherhood. Azaizeh will read her poems in Arabic, with the English translations read by Tishani Doshi.
Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good was the winner of the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The work focuses on how we are made, how we get lost and how we find new selves, framed around the story of an escape from a toxic marriage.
Tickets for the event cost £16 (up to 20% off for members) and can be purchased online at www.thecoronettheatre.com/whats-on/poetry-club-4-june-26.
Dead Poets Live, 19-21 June – Briggflatts – An Autobiography by Basil Bunting, Starring Simon McBurney
Dead Poets Live at the Coronet Theatre has established a cult following for dramatised readings of classic poetry, with past editions featuring some of Britain’s finest actors, including Rory Kinnear, Patsy Ferran, Lindsay Duncan, Denise Gough, Toby Jones, Eanna Hardwicke and Tom Hiddleston.
This June, actor, writer and director – one of Britain’s theatre-makers – Simon McBurney will be exploring the life of Basil Bunting and performing Brigflatts – considered to be one of the greatest and most unjustly neglected poetic accomplishments in English.
Bunting wrote Brigflatts in 1964, whilst living in Newcastle in grinding poverty in obscurity, working as a sub-editor on a local paper and having barely written a poem in 30 years. The long poem is an unforgiving self-reckoning by a poet in old age, telling a history of human violence and folly across the centuries, journeying through Northumbria, Italy, the Arctic Ocean, Bloomsburyite London and Iran. It is a love story spanning fifty years, and the autobiography of a man whose life almost defies belief.
Performances take place on Friday 19th, Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st June at 7.30pm. Tickets cost £40, £30 and £20 standard (up to 20% off for members) and can be purchased online at www.thecoronettheatre.com/whats-on/dead-poets-live-briggflatts-an-autobiography.
Poetry Club
7.30pm, 4th June 2026
and
Dead Poets Live
7.30pm, 19th – 21st June 2026
Coronet Theatre
103 Notting Hill Gate
London
W11 3LB
www.thecoronettheatre.com
