Robin Vaughan-Williams

Robin Vaughan-Williams

Robin is a poet, poetry producer, and author of The Manager, a sequence of poems that charts the backwaters of managerial reality, ‘a joyful object-lesson in how to mine genuine poetry from the most banal depths of modern life’. He also runs writing workshops, and enjoys collaborating with artists and musicians and exploring the use of multimedia in performance.

Originally from London, Robin moved to Sheffield in 1999, where he ran Spoken Word Antics for five years, presented the Antics radio show on SheffieldLive, and produced a series of site-specific sound and poetry collage-performances. After a spell in Iceland, he moved to Nottingham, where he was Development Director for Nottingham Writers' Studio, Literature Producer for World Event Young Artists, and instigated the first Nottingham Festival of Words (February 2013). He now lives in London, where he works as a freelance creative writing facilitator and is developing a poetry improvisation project.

Robin has been producing live literature events since 2003. In that time he has booked over 40 featured writers and worked on three live literature series: Spoken Word Antics (Sheffield), Word of Mouth (Nottingham Writers’ Studio), and Jazz and Poetry (Nottingham, with Shoestring Press). He has also organised numerous poetry readings and cross-artform events, and programmed courses, workshops, education projects, talks, and networking events for writers.

Some of his collaborations include ‘Time Is Running Out! (restart your system now)’, a mesmerising poetry and music piece commissioned with the Ella Luk project for Off the Shelf 2009, and a script for Surveillance Suite, an auto-generative CCTV project by artist James Coupe. He is currently collaborating with artist Alban Low on a number of film-poems based on a simulated mental health ward in St George’s Hospital, Tooting.

He has run writing workshops for organisations like Sheffield Young Writers, Aphasia Nottingham, Off the Shelf, and Apples and Snakes, and specialises in group devising, writing for performance, and poetry improvisation.

Robin's poetry has been published by Happenstance Press, Candlestick Press, Under the Radar, Long Poem Magazine, Poems Underwater, and Hearing Voices, among other places. He has performed his work all over the country, and has delivered Manager sets at places like Saltmarsh Poetry (Burnham Market), Word of Mouth (Nottingham), States of Independence (Leicester), Shindig (Nottingham), Bank Street Arts (Sheffield), the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh), Wicked Words (Leeds), Rhythm and Muse (Kingston-upon-Thames), Missfit Mondays (Hoxton), Verberate (Manchester), Speaker’s Corner (York), and the Writers’ Cafe (Stockton-on-Tees).
Robin blogs at www.zeroquality.net/zqblog.