Out-Spoken: April — Leyla Josephine, Nick Makoha, Richard Scott
Southbank Centre's monthly poetry and live music night features Leyla Josephine, Dr Nick Makoha, and Richard Scott, hosted by Joelle Taylor.
Why we picked this
Three poets who have each carved out a genuinely distinct territory — Josephine's performance-rooted work, Makoha's long engagement with conflict and history, and Scott's unflinching queer lyric — sharing a stage in a room where the music keeps the evening from ever settling too comfortably.
Out-Spoken is the Southbank Centre’s longest-running poetry night, and it has earned its reputation by booking poets who are actually doing something with the form rather than simply performing competence. Each monthly gig at the Purcell Room is hosted by Joelle Taylor — the TS Eliot and Polari Prize-winning poet — with Sam ‘Junior’ Bromfield’s reggae, soul, and R&B selections threading through the evening in ways that remind you poetry and music have always been in conversation.
The April edition brings three poets working in very different modes. Leyla Josephine is a poet, film-maker, and theatre-maker from Glasgow, known for work that crosses between performance and the page. Her poem ‘Dear John Berger’ won the Best Single Poem Performed Forward Prize 2024 and signals the kind of directness and intelligence she brings to any platform. Dr Nick Makoha, a Ugandan-British poet who has been a notable presence in British poetry for a decade, works through African history, myth, and violence with formal ambition — his poems earn their difficulty. Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals (Faber, 2025), extends the exploration of queer desire and shame he began with Soho; he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Goldsmiths.
Together they represent something like the range of where British poetry currently sits — geographically, formally, and in terms of what it thinks it’s for. The Purcell Room, which holds just over 300 people, keeps the evening intimate enough that the differences between the poets are audible.