Curatorial

I’ve tried to innovate what live literature can be, to inculcate challenging, complex and engaged live works in an atmosphere and context which is generous and welcoming. I’ve done this through utilising ideas like collaboration and commissions. My work has taken in over 500 events over the last decade, working with over 1000 poets and writers. I’ve organised a dozen exhibitions alongside events, programmes, tours and educational activities, in 26 countries and been commissioned by some of the world’s biggest festivals and institutions.

The vast majority of those events have been documented with video, images and text and are best discovered through the websites of the organisations I founded or direct. Please click below to read more about my four primary event projects.

The Enemies Project is fundamentally about collaboration. It includes multiple tours of the UK, exchanges with poets around the world and one off commissions with festivals.

The Enemies Project is fundamentally about collaboration. It includes multiple tours of the UK, exchanges with poets around the world and one off commissions with festivals.

The European Poetry Festival celebrates the brilliance of 21st century continental poetry across Europe. It’s the biggest Eurocentric festival of literature in the UK.

The European Poetry Festival celebrates the brilliance of 21st century continental poetry across Europe. It’s the biggest Eurocentric festival of literature in the UK.

Poem Brut explores the potential for new ways of writing through analogue methods and new understandings of the brain and literature. Mess meets neuropoetics

Poem Brut explores the potential for new ways of writing through analogue methods and new understandings of the brain and literature. Mess meets neuropoetics

Writers Centre Kingston is Kingston University's literary cultural hub with an annual programme of events for staff, students and people local to Kingston Upon Thames.

Writers Centre Kingston is Kingston University's literary cultural hub with an annual programme of events for staff, students and people local to Kingston Upon Thames.

My work has been supported by over 30 funding bodies and creative institutions including Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, British Council, Arts Council Wales, Creative Scotland, Conaculta, Creative Ireland, Goethe Institut, Austrian Cultural Forum, Institut Francais & many more. I've been commissioned by institutions including Wellcome Collection, UNESCO, The British Museum and London Bookfair and I have curated events, workshops and programmes fro festivals, galleries, institutions and arts centres such as Arnolfini, Calvert 22, Tate, Poetry Society, Rose Theatre, London Bookfair, Rich Mix, Lettretage, Southbank Centre, International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Poetry Parnassus, London Literature Festival, NOVA, Ledbury, StanZa, Essex Book Festival, and more.

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The Enemies Project

began in 2010. It has pioneered collaborative and commission-based live literature with an international focus for over 400 events in 26 countries, involving over 1000 poets, writers and artists. It has made a space for purposeful experimentation and innovation that actually reflects the chaos of 21st life while maintaining a consistently open and accessible event atmosphere. Centred around the curatorial work of SJ Fowler, it has been an origin point for four cohesive projects, linked above, all still essentially part of The Enemies Project through their collaborative and aesthetic pursuits. Below you can find current standalone Enemies Projects and events from our near decade long history, with nationwide tours, events on neuroaesthetics and neurodiversity, longstanding international collaborations between the UK and Mexico, Argentina, Georgia, South Korea et al and numerous commissions events with festivals from Krakow to St Andrews.

European Poetry Festival

celebrates, in the UK and beyond, the grand resurgence in avant-garde and literary poetry that has marked the 21st century in Europe. It aims to not only innovative what a live poetry experience might be, but to inculcate community and engagement between poets across the continent, as well as between new audiences and complex poetries. The EPF is trying to create a new understanding of what European literature might be in a new Europe.

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Poem Brut

celebrates artistic creative writing and its relationship with neurobiology - embracing text and colour, space and time, handwriting, composition, abstraction, illustration, sound, mess and motion - affirming the possibilities of the page, the pen, the process, the performance and the voice in a computer age. It is a project that celebrates genuine authentic originality in poetry, without overt recourse to biographical context and identity, and resists a literature of control, neatness, poise and direct, didactic meaning. Through over a dozen live events, nearly 100 commissions, exhibitions at The Poetry Society and Rich Mix, a series of new books and online publications on 3am magazine, Poem Brut has offered an alternative understanding of 21st century literature since 2017.

Writers’ Centre Kingston

is Kingston University's literary cultural centre dedicated to creative writing in all its forms, with an annual programme of events from talks to workshops and festivals. The programme consists of a dozen events – some themed, with speakers responding to that concept with a new reading or talk or performance - and others celebrating a festival or regular reading series. The speakers are both guests to the Centre as well as those drawn from the academic staff at Kingston University, home of WCK. Student and alumnus readings accompany this main programme. The events are also often hosted and curated in partnership with institutions local to Kingston University and in London, from The Rose Theatre to the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, from the Museum of Futures to Kingston First. These partnerships are key to the mode of the Centre, sharing and gaining expertise in collaboration.

The Camarade

is a format of live literary events that I have pioneered, begun with The Enemies Project. It simply asks pairs of poets, many of whom have never met before, to produce new collaborative works for the night of the reading, with no criteria other than a time limit. This non-determinate curatorial model creates innate innovation and explorations of the possibilities around live poetry and performance. Moreover, it creates friendships and communities. These events are rapid fire and energised but fundamentally serious and complex in the work they often produce. These events make up the core programme of the EPF in the UK, and much of the other events and commissions listed on this page. Recently they have been commissioned for one-off nights in places across Europe and the early Camarade events can be seen www.theenemiesproject.com/camarade/

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Austrian Cultural Forum : Kakania and Illuminations

One of the most intelligently and resonantly supportive partners I've had in my career, the Austrian Cultural Forum in London, have been a second home to my events, performances and publications. With uniformly generous support and the kind of multifaceted taste in art and writing that has allowed work like mine to flourish, I have run 5 events for Kakania with one symposium, 7 events for Illuminations, 2 for Feinde and 2 for The European Poetry Festival. These two projects - based on a commission and response model of live literature - have been key for my work.

States of Mind : Wellcome Collection

Wonderful to have spoke at and curated three events for Wellcome Collection's exhibition on consciousness, States of Mind. These events brought together expertise from a wide array of fields, from neuroscience to performance art, from philosophy to filmmaking, in order to explore the notion of consciousness through the concepts of language, sound and narrative. They were curated to be complimentary in their differences and to evidence the complexity of ideas and approaches surrounding any valuable insight into the question of consciousness. 

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Nordic Poetry Festival

Began in 2019, a standalone festival celebrating contemporary Nordic poets with five events in the UK. Exploring collaboration and performance over one week, the festival saw events at Rich Mix and Burley Fisher Books in London, alongside a minibus tour to the National Centre for Writing in Norwich and York’s Jorvik Viking Centre. Over 30 poets came from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Sami and the festival produced a small anthology and exhibition.

UK and Ireland Poetry Tours 2014-2020

Emerging from The Enemies project, I’ve co-curated five tours around the UK and Ireland. Often out of London, focusing on the remarkable experimental poets of other places, asking those local to each town and city on the tours to make new collaborations each night. More at stevenjfowler.com/uktours

International Collaborative Poetry Projects

A staple of my work has been to create links between poets in the UK and other nations around the world. This has often taken the form of collaborative exchanges, where poets meet in both nations, make new works together and perform and publish them. Here is a small selection of nation-specific projects, a dozen of about thirty such projects.

Dostoyevsky Wannabe tour 2020

This tour saw readings and performances from 10 writers from 6 countries, all on the DW list, presenting their titles in the literary and avant-garde traditions in Kingston, Bethnal Green, Kentish Town and Amsterdam. http://www.theenemiesproject.com/#/dostoyevskywannabe/

Torriano Events