Poetry Spotlight, hosted by Caroline Davies

Two award-winning poets – one emerging with a debut collection, the other returning with their fifth – explore identify, togetherness and separation, and the human search for joy, in two of the most feted and anticipated poetry books of the last year.

Isabelle Baafi’s Chaotic Good is an evocative journey of self-discovery and reclamation in the wake of divorce, exploring the transformative journey of redefining one's identity following trauma and upheaval. Simmering with energy and immediacy, it interrogates how much our identity is determined by the circumstances into which we are born.

John McCullough's Crowd Voltage addresses yearnings for community, probing fragmentation and disturbances within the body of the crowd and the crowd of the body. Engaging with working-class and queer experiences, the poems move between solitude and togetherness, haunted by ghosts from history as they dream of unity and discover joy in deserted corners.

About Isabelle Baafi

Isabelle Baafi is the author of Chaotic Good (Faber & Faber/Wesleyan University Press, 2025), which won the Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and is longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her pamphlet Ripe (ignitionpress, 2020) won a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. She won First Prize in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2023 and Second Prize in the London Magazine Poetry Prize 2022. Her writing has been published in Granta, the TLS, The Poetry Review, Callaloo, The London Magazine and elsewhere. She edits at Poetry London and Magma.

More about Isabelle

• Web: isabellebaafi.com
• Instagram: @isabellebaafi

Buy the book at Waterstones

About John McCullough

John McCullough lives in Hove. His book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. John’s collections have been Books of the Year for publications including The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Telegraph and he also won the Polari First Book Prize. The poem ‘Flower of Sulphur’, from his fourth collection Panic Response (Penned in the Margins), was shortlisted for the 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. His fifth collection, Crowd Voltage, is published in March 2026 by Bloodaxe.

More about John

• Web: johnmccullough.co.uk
• Instagram: @mrjohnmccullough
• X: @JohnMcCullough_

Buy the book at Waterstones

About Caroline Davies

Caroline Davies was born in Norfolk to Welsh parents and is a life-long learner of Welsh. (Thanks to Bangor University/Prifysgol Bangor she’s getting more fluent these days). She is a founder member of Poets for the Planet and has organised fund raising events for them. She has an MA Writing Poetry from the Poetry School London/University of Newcastle. The poem she is most proud to have written is What the bully at work cannot touch, which can be shared with anyone who needs to banish a bullying person from their life.

About MK Lit Fest

Milton Keynes Literary Festival (MK Lit Fest) began in 2017, since when over 250 authors - ranging from international bestsellers to debut novelists, and including all kinds of fiction and non-fiction - have appeared at our in-person and online events. We also host children's events, literary walks, writing workshops, submission-based events for local writers, an annual writing competition and anthology, and more. Our next in-person festival is happening between 22 and 26 April 2026 in Central Milton Keynes, but our programme extends year round. Visit us online at  www.mklitfest.org or follow us as @MKLitFest on most social channels.