2025 marks the sixth year of the Paisley Book Festival, which has gained a reputation as a festival that foregrounds bold ideas and radical thinking, showcasing the best in Scottish writing, platforming the voices and stories of everyday people, and supporting a burgeoning community of book enthusiasts in Paisley.

Poet’s Corner is a lunch hour taking place each day of the festival, showcasing exciting new work and voices in Scottish poetry.

On Sunday, Poet’s Corner, three contemporary poets introduce work that travels across languages, disability activism, and ecological crisis, all channelled through their experience of parenthood. The lives we live are full of a strange combination of sharp challenge, exhaustion, anxiety, and the overwhelming love that children bring with them into this fractured world. Acclaimed poets Samuel Tongue, Nuala Watt, and Taylor Strickland present poems that reflect on how parenthood can both engender connection and open new distances, and how a reshaping of roles and responsibilities impacts on a sense of self.