Colin Bramwell for Fetch

We are delighted to be welcoming an incredible local talent, Colin Bramwell, for the launch of his debut poetry collection, Fetch. Reading alongside him will be poets Michael Grieve and Jacob Polley.

Following his recent success after winning both the 2026 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize and the 2026 Highland Book Prize for his translation of Fernando Pessoa into Scots, Fower Pessoas, Bramwell returns with a debut collection that is sure to delight with its distinctive voice.

We look forward to seeing you there!

On Fetch: In Celtic folklore a fetch is a shadowy doppelganger that appears from the Otherworld, portending the beholder’s fate. Your fetch ‘fetches’ you to the afterlife, willingly or otherwise. Bramwell’s poetry uses the fetch as a model to explore a number of overlapping binaries – between the reader and the poem, most of all. Fetch also meditates on the differences between music and speech, the sacred and the profane, the written and the real, humanity and nature, Scots and English. Incorporating multitudes of modes, forms, registers and subjects, Bramwell converses with the Anglo-Celtic lyric tradition in our own time and in his own distinctively amiable fashion. In other words, this poet takes poetry seriously – but not too seriously.

Fetch is a tour-de-force debut from one of Britain’s most exciting new poets, in which reverence and irreverence, religion and faithlessness, the living and the dead, nearly rhyme.

Colin Bramwell was born in Ayrshire, grew up in Fortrose on the Black Isle and lives in Edinburgh. His poetry and criticism has appeared in The Observer, New Statesman, Poetry Review, Irish Pages, The London Magazine, PN Review, Magma, The Rialto, New Writing Scotland, Interpret, Poetry Scotland, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and The Scotsman, as well as in his pamphlet The Highland Citizenship Test (Stewed Rhubarb 2021). He was the runner-up for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize. His co-translations of Taiwanese poets won the John Dryden Translation Competition and the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. Fower Pessoas, his rendition of Fernando Pessoa into Scots, was published by Carcanet in 2025 and selected as a TLS Book of the Year for 2025, as well as being shortlisted for both Scots Book of the Year and the Highland Book Prize, and winning the 2026 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Michael Grieve lives in Fife, Scotland. He works as a teacher, and before that was a bookseller. His work has appeared in many poetry journals, including The Little Review, The Dark Horse and the Irish Pages, while his pamphlet Luck is published by HappenStance. He was shortlisted for the 2020 Edwin Morgan Prize. His debut collection, Asterism, is out with And Other Stories in January 2027.

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. His most recent book of poems is Material Properties (2023). His fourth book of poems, Jackself (2016), won the T.S. Eliot Prize. His previous books are The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) and The Havocs (2012), and a novel, Talk of the Town (2009), all published by Picador, UK. Talk of the Town won the Somerset Maugham Award in 2010. Jacob received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He teaches at Newcastle University and lives with his family on the north-east coast.