Readings, Appearances, Tuition

2025
March 2026: Spread the Word, with Sarah Howe, Erica Hesketh, and April Yee.
April 2026: Waterford, Ireland.
April 2026: Lyra Festival, Bristol.
2025
Sunday 26th October 2025: Royal Festival Hall, London. Page to Publication with Iqbal Hussain, Seun Olayiwola, Jess Murrain.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be at Ledbury Literature Festival on Friday July 4th with the wonderful Ruth Padel. We’ll be at Burgage Hall from 4pm and if you can’t be with us in person the event is being live streamed on Vimeo. Fabulous!

The festival literature says:
In Girl, Ruth Padel offers a fresh and questioning look at girlhood and its icons. Across a triptych of sequences, Ruth Padel unravels the millennia of myth woven around girls.
Karen Downs-Barton’s Minx reveals the vibrant but precarious world of a multi-racial Romani family. Uplifting and heart-breaking; a lyrical evocation of a childhood on the edge of society that marks the arrival of a vital new voice.

Edinburgh International Book Festival
I’ve been keeping this gig under my cheekily little hat for some time now and at last I can lift that hat and let the news fly out. I’ll be appearing at Edinburgh International Book Festival on Thursday 14th August, 10:15-11:15. Do come up and say ‘hi’ if you’re visiting, grab a copy of Minx and get me to sign it with my wonderfully spidery dyslexic writing. The theme is What it Means to Belong and here’s what the festival writers have said about it…
Karen Downs-Barton: What it Means to Belong Has anywhere sounded more ominous than the ‘Home for Crying Children’? Join Karen Downs-Barton, whose playful new poetry collection Minx effortlessly blends forms in a lyrically vivid evocation of a childhood distinctly less ordinary…
Come and hear about the life less ordinary among my moonshine brewing grandparents, troubled mother, non-clairvoyant sister, and all the real and adopted uncles and aunts.

THE VERB. I’m featured on BBC radio 4’s The Verb reading poems from Minx, available on iPlayer. It was a delight to be able to share the poems live, talk about areas where poetry meets performance in diverse settings and through diverse concepts of what a poem can be. The poetry/performance interface included poetry dropped from helicopters, poetry generated on football terraces or quoted in parliaments, and the performance of poetry that invades the space of prose, questionnaires or the world of the dictionary. Do check it out.

*Here’s a snap of poetry, or at least poets, invading the space of the Blue Peter garden. My intrepid co-invader is Naz, one of the other guests from The Verb. Sending a huge ‘Thank You’ to Ian McMillan and Ekene Akalawu for this opportunity and for their warm reception.*

I am holding a number of online workshops for Creative Future:

A Compelling Character. Monday 22nd January 2024, 6.30-8.00. Full. Please contact Creative Future to add your name to the waiting list.

Whether we’re writing poetry, prose or memoir, how can we make our work authentic and characterful? This workshop takes examples of contemporary writers across genres, including those using poetry and hybrid forms, and examining how they create characters that readers believe in.

We’ll practice becoming close observers and literary magpies, taking pointers from contemporary methods to build multi-layered, original actors. We’ll experiment with reshaping methods to suit your style, genre, and subject and talk about the moment when a character takes on a life of their own.

Experimenting with a range of writing exercises the workshop focuses on how to observe with a writer’s eye, reimagining people, and their situations to invent characters that are new, compelling, and all your own.

Ekphrasis. Monday 8th January, 2024. 6.30-8.00. Full. Please contact Creative Future to add your name to the waiting list.

This workshop draws from the long history of writers who have been inspired by visual arts and visual artists inspired by literature. Writers have been compelled to put pen to paper by paintings, photographs, and strange or meaningful objects.

We’ll explore examples including Dante Gabrielle Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites to the contemporary writing of Jane Yeo and Rebecca Perry, creating exciting conversations between writing and art.

This workshop looks at how responding to the arts can open doors to new worlds and new characters our writing can inhabit. This workshop aims to challenge and transform your current creative process, building a treasure trove of visual stimuli.

Prepare to come away with original and surprising work as well as ideas about sources of inspiration to suit your writing style and genre. You’ll never have to wonder what to write about again.

Experimenting with a range of writing exercises the workshop focuses on how to observe with a writer’s eye, reimagining people, and their situations to invent characters that are new, compelling, and all your own.

Thinking Across the Page. Wednesday 18th October 2023. 6.30-8.00

Why do we sometimes find filling an empty page with words of our own so daunting, so painful? In this workshop, we’ll look at ways to spark new and unexpected ideas, to re-shape them on the page with editing for creative pieces that can be as pain-free as thinking. These writing exercises will take examples of exciting techniques used by contemporary writers, experimenting with the frames they’ve created and reshaping those frames to suit our personal styles. While developing a useful toolbox of techniques we’ll play with form, write and un-write letters, and use Surrealist methods to challenge and enhance writerly practice.  

This session is for all writers, new or seasoned, whether you’re working on fiction, non-fiction, plays, essays, theses or poetry.  FULLY BOOKED. Contact Creative Future to add your name to the waiting list.

I’m headlining at Cheltenham Poetry Festival with the lovely Rachel Clyne on Monday 31st July. I’ll be reading from my Poetry Society Recommended pamphlet Didicoy, and some new pieces from my forthcoming collection. Tickets available through Ticket Source. Do come along… There’s an open mic for fellow poets to share their work too.

Wednesday 22nd March, 2023.

Satellite of Love – Poetry and Spoken Word at the Lightship, Bristol.

A great venue, welcoming audience, and a fab night of poetic delights. I will definitely be back!

Saturday 18th March 2023: The Poetry Business Competition Winners Reading, International Book and Pamphlet Competition winners 2022 @ Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

Reading in the atmospheric setting of the book-lined Reading Room in the Jerwood Centre at Wordsworth Grasmere was an absolute treat.

This amazing event included the four winning poets of the 2021 competition, selected by Daljit Nagra and Pascale Petit, the poets Dean Browne for his collection Kitchens at Night, Jim McElroy for this collection We are the Weather, Maya C Popa for her collection Dear Life, and Anastasia Taylor-Lind for her collection One Language.

The four winning poets of the 2022 competition were selected by Jonathan Edwards and Romalyn Ante and included myself for Didicoy, Jon Miller for his collection Past Imperfect, Future Tense, Zoë Walkington for her collection I hate to be the one to tell you, and Luke Samuel Yates for his collection The Mystery Shopper.

Saturday 22nd October:

So excited to be reading at the London Literature Festival at the South Bank in October. If you’re coming along please grab me and say ‘Hi’. I’m the Silver award winner in the poetry category of the Creative Future competition and will be receiving my prize alongside some amazing writers. As if that weren’t enough to tempt you the T.S.Elliot prize winner 2022 Joelle Taylor will be reading too. https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/talks-debates/creative-future-writers-day

Thursday 15th September 2022:

I’ll be reading my award winning poem Framed by Woodgrain and discussing poetry competitions, Creative Future, why I write and so much more on BBC Radio Wiltshire. The station is available online so do check it out at 12.10.

4th September, Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival

I’m a featured poet at the Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival reading a number of poems from my forthcoming collection and new work from my second collection. Check out the web site for more details. This is a long weekend of poetic indulgence so why not make a mini poetry break of it?

7th July, Lumb Bank, West Yorkshire.

It was my pleasure to be MC and read alongside so many amazing poets at the home of Ted Hughes, Lumb Bank, at a wonderfully productive Arvon retreat. I shared poems from my forthcoming collection, Didicoy, and some of the poems from my PhD collection. A massive ‘thank you’ to the Mimi Khalvati, Zaffar Kunial, the Lumb staff, and all the fun, creative and raucous writers who made it such a memorable time.

Friday 24th – Saturday 25th June

Reading at the Conditions and Terms: Methods and Disciplines of Knowledge conference, Kings College, The Strand. I’m delivering a paper about the GRT and one of the organising team too.

Phew!!!