Elizabeth McGeown is a Pushcart-nominated poet from Belfast in Northern Ireland. She is the 2022 UK Slam Champion and has been published in journals including Banshee, Abridged, Under the Radar and Poetry Wales. Her debut collection ‘Cockroach’ was published in 2022 by Verve Poetry Press.
As a spoken word artist, she was longlisted in the Saboteur Awards 2021 and 2022 for ‘Best Spoken Word Performer’. She is a three-time All-Ulster/Northern Ireland Poetry Slam Champion, four-time finalist in the All-Ireland Poetry Slam and represented Northern Ireland in the Hammer & Tongue UK Slam Championships 2019 and 2021. She won the Cúirt International Festival of Literature: Spoken Word Platform 2019 and the Cursed Murphy Spoken Word Prize 2019. She was chosen by judges from Dublin: UNESCO City Of Literature to take part in the Lingo Festival Slam 2015, placing third in the same competition in 2016. Featured gigs include She Grrrowls, Hammer & Tongue, Loud Poets, Electric Picnic, First Fortnight Festival, Body & Soul Festival, CS Lewis Festival.
Her first full-length show and accompanying book were written with the help of a Support for the Individual Artist Programme grant by The Arts Council Of Northern Ireland, as well as being funded through the University of Atypical (a disabled-led arts charity, taking an empowerment based approach towards supporting disabled and deaf people’s involvement in the arts).
Elizabeth’s poetry focuses on themes of Feminism, mental health, disability, the body and neurodivergence using metaphor to explore all of the above. As a Film Studies graduate she loves to explore the beauty of horror cinema and how it corresponds to real life, especially in the lives of disabled and neurodivergent people and how isolation can manifest in those lives.
QUOTES
“Elizabeth is always amazing, every time I see her, but she sets the bar higher every time. What an incredible talent.”
– Melanie Branton, author of ‘Can You See Where I’m Coming From?’ (Burning Eye)
“You know those Celtic spiral patterns – Elizabeth’s poetry, crossing and recrossing, gorgeous colours, elegant and disorientating.”
– Fay Roberts, host of Hammer & Tongue Cambridge and Allographic
“[These] poems are stupendous.”
– Rick Dove, author of ‘Tales from the Other Box’(Burning Eye, 2020)