“a brilliant night” (For Books’ Sake)
“While ‘The New Libertines’ sounds like a Granta style tag for a new movement, there was too much variety on show for the acts to be pigeonholed – it does appear to be a guarantee of a good night out though” (Workshy Fop)
“the most oh-wow-this-is-tops event of 2012″ (Fat Roland of Flashtag Manchester)
“quite fabulous” (Elizabeth Baines, author of The Birth Machine)
“Forget the ennui of the 9-5.
Stories of bingo, of sex, knife crime, coagulated time.
Performed with passion, physicality and style. Let your bones submerge in this bath of finely spiced voices” (Daily Information, Oxford, on Oxfringe Read Full Review)
Tickets are out now for the New Libertines at Stoke Newington Literary Festival on June 3rd at 3pm at the amazing Baby Bath House. CLICK HERE for details and box office - it’s just £4 and last year we sold out well in advance so please go and book. We have an incredible line-up for this year with award-winning slam poets and celebrated short fiction writers as well as leading lights of the poetry scene from Manchester, Oxford, London, Milton Keynes, and Stroud.
The New Libertines is eight cuts gallery’s touring troupe of troubadour tearaways. New Libertines shows follow a very simple principle – there are no headline or support acts – just a taster menu of amazing performance poets and flash fictioneers performing small but perfectly formed sets to open your eyes to a whole dizzying area of dazzling performance. Oh, and live music of the very best kind to frame the night.
(Paul Askew’s breathtaking performance at The New Libertines at Chipping Norton Literary Festival)
Danni Antagonist, bard of Stony Stratford
Paul Askew, editor of Ferment, Hammer and Tongue slam winner
Hay Brunsdon, finalist for Gloucestershire Poet Laureate (coming up on August 18th)
Hannah Elwick
Penny Goring, author of The Zoom Zoom
(Penny Goring at Covent Garden Poetry Cafe)
(Jessie Grace [left] at one of our first ever shows in London in 2010)
Jessie Grace, brilliant blues singer-songwriter
Emily Harrison, winner of the 2010 Tower Poetry Prize
(Dan Holloway at Pow-Wow Literary Festival, Birmingham)
Dan Holloway, Literary Death Match winner
Marc Nash, acclaimed flash fiction writer
(Clarissa Pabi)
Clarissa Pabi, 2010-11 president of Oxford University Poetry Society, Orange Prize judge, MC of FULLPHAT
(Anna Percy at The New Libertines’ barnstorming gig at Three Minute Theatre in Manchester’s legendary Afflecks)
Anna Percy, curator of the Stirred Poetry Collective
Claire Trevien, author of Low Tide Lottery (Salt Modern Voices) and editor of Sabotage Reviews
(James Purcell Webster)
James Purcell Webster, the man who will send you poetry direct to your phone
The New Libertine movement, if it can be labelled a movement, stands for human experience in its glorious, messy, complex entirity, and stands against everything that is blank, bleak, and brutal, one dimensional or slick in contemporary culture, especially current literary culture. With roots that spread to burlesque, Beat, fin de siecle France and ecstatic mystics before slapping its influences around the face with a knuckle-dusting of postmodern wit and Modernist anger, New Libertinism is a celebration of light in dark corners, desire in the face of boredom, despair hidden beneath the underskirts of affluence – of everything it means to be human.
Writing that serves up the whole of life, in the smallest microcosms maybe, single truths told in single voices, but told in the full – the ugly and the beautiful; the hopeful and the despairing; the angry and the aspiring; that wrings art, words, life itself until they offer up every last secret, every hidden pain, every unexpected and delightful pleasure; that gives life in the full. Free from judgement. Free from taboo. Free from pretence.
