A Break in the Waves

Recorded during Push the Boat Out Festival 2025, this scratch performance took Karen McCarthy Woolf’s novel-in-verse Top Doll as its starting point. Described as ‘weird, wild’ and ‘unstoppably inventive’, Top Doll follows the story of a reclusive millionaire heiress, travelling from modern-day Park Avenue to the slave plantations of Virginia and the palaces of Imperial Japan via the addictive hedonism of 1930s queer LA – all told from the perspective of her vast collection of dolls.
The performance marked the debut of a brand new collaboration between Karen and multi-instrumentalist and performer Kerensa, whose work moves fluidly between genres, including opera-inspired pop. Created as a scratch performance, it offered audiences at Push the Boat Out Festival 2025 an early glimpse of this exciting new creative partnership.
 

In this episode, recorded live at Push the Boat Out in November 2025, Len Pennie joins Festival Director Emma Collins to discuss her acclaimed collection poyums annaw, exploring themes of patriarchy, gender-based violence and social injustice through poetry and humour. Featuring readings from the collection and reflections on the power of Scots language, this episode offers a fierce, funny and deeply personal conversation.

In this special episode, recorded live at Push the Boat Out in November 2025, two of the most compelling voices in contemporary poetry come together for a haunting and illuminating conversation, chaired by Jenny Niven, Director of Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Pascale Petit and Fiona Benson – shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize seven times between them – read from and discuss their darkly beautiful latest collections, offering insight into the creative forces that shape their work.
In Midden Witch, Fiona Benson enters a world of familiars, fables and hedge-magic, allowing the women accused of witchcraft to speak back across the centuries. Her poems give voice to artists, dreamers and outcasts, confronting the deep-rooted fears that surface in the face of the unknown.
Pascale Petit’s Beast, meanwhile, roams through landscapes both mythic and familial, peopled with creatures that are at once intimate and untamed. Even as they question the possibility of survival, her poems insist on art-making as an act of defiance and hope.
Together, in conversation, they explore myth, memory, wildness and the transformative power of poetry.

Becoming a father is not an easy process: the sleepless nights and burden of new responsibilities can weigh heavily. But amidst the challenges, there’s an untold joy that comes with meeting your child and discovering a new kind of love that can reshape your world.
Raymond Antrobus and Niall Campbell have written extensively about fatherhood, love, and masculinity. Antrobus’s most recent collection, ‘Signs, Music,’ reflects on imminent fatherhood and stepping into this role, while Campbell’s collections ‘Noctuary’ and ‘The Island in the Sound’ are filled with the discoveries of what it is to become a father.
Recorded at Push the Boat Out 2024. Recording by EHFM.

Contemporary poetry can challenge, explore uncomfortable truths, and bear witness to unimaginable experiences.
In Sasha Dugdale’s new collection, The Strongbox, recent history and Greek mythology meet. Her varied cast of characters are abducted to foreign lands, travel through war zones, and are haunted by conflicts.
Oksana Maksymchuk’s Still City reflects life in the wake of extreme and unpredictable violence. Beginning as a poetic journal kept from her hometime in Ukraine, 2021-22, it chronicles events as the poet, her family and community prepare for airstrikes, as well as nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.
As part of Push the Boat Out in 2024, Sasha and Oksana discussed what it was to write poetry in times of conflict. The event was chaired by Alice Eaves through the ConVERSE Emerging Chairs Programme with the University of Edinburgh.

In partnership with the Forward Prizes for Poetry, Push the Boat Out brought together two poets who released razor sharp collections in 2024 to discuss their work. Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake shows us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending while Ella Frears’ Goodlord: An Email is a genre-defying book that takes the form of one long email, addressed to an estate agent.
Chaired by Push the Boat Out Festival Director, Emma Collins.

Disrupting the Narrative opened Push the Boat Out in 2024 with a theatrical performance exploring Edinburgh’s heritage from the perspective of its colonial past and uncovering stories of the city that haven’t always been acknowledged. Behind Disrupting the Narrative is a discussion based on the performance that further explores how art can contribute to the decolonisation of our heritage and the importance of doing so.
Curator of Discomfort at the Hunterian Museum Zandra Yeaman, founder of the Edinburgh Caribbean Association Lisa Williams, and poet and anti-racist campaigner Shasta Ali, join the former Edinburgh Makar Hannah Lavery to discuss Disrupting the Narrative and the decolonisation of Edinburgh’s past. Part of the Edinburgh 900 Anniversary programme.

Our latest podcast episode was recorded at our 2023 festival. Three hugely talented lyricists – rising indie star Hamish Hawk, Scottish folk legend Karine Polwart and celebrated cross-disciplinary artist Inua Ellams – come together to offer rare insights into the processes behind creating a song.
What inspires the vivid imagery and metaphor in their work and how do they bring this into conversation with music? What do poetry and songwriting have in common? What is music able to communicate that words can’t?

Listen to our new podcast episode recorded from our 2023 festival. This month, Jenny Niven talks with Jeremy Corbyn and Len McCluskey as they read some of their favourite poems from their co-published anthology Poetry for the Many.
This beautiful new anthology features wide-ranging poems that have moved and enlightened them and, they hope, go some way to democratising poetry. William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Maya Angelou and Linton Kwesi Johnson are included, with contributions by Maxine Peake, Michael Rosen and Ken Loach, to name some. Expect heartfelt readings and conversation on socialism, language and love poetry.

Hear work from two new stunning debut collections from Scotland-based poets K Patrick and Marjorie Lotfi recorded at our 2023 festival.
K Patrick’s poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Granta and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021. Their debut novel, Mrs S was selected as an Observer Best Debut of the Year, and K was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelists for 2023. Their forthcoming collection Three Births manoeuvres through marriage and divorce, nature writing and 20th Century literary figures, culminating in the subtle but powerful message that we should be able to inhabit the body we want to and love freely within this.
Marjorie Lotfi’s award-winning debut collection The Wrong Person to Ask is a book of two halves, each a meditation on home, both the places where we begin and end up in our lives. From a childhood in Iran dislocated by revolution to life in America and then Scotland, these poems ask what it means to come from somewhere else, what we carry with us when we leave, and how we land in a new place and finally come to rest.