Having spent years travelling to lesser known parts of the world, DJ duo Sweet Charity have amassed a collection of lesser known, forgotten-to-time-and-taste records from across the globe that are guarantee’d to have you dancing til the early hours. Starting with a monthly night at the ICA they expanded their thrift store and charity shop record sets to Glastonbury festival where they run the late night cruise ship HMS Sweet Charity.

Sophie Naufal is a London based British Lebanese composer, musician and performer. As a film and theatre composer Sophie blends a vast array of samples from around the world with her own instrumentals creating innovative, textured soundscapes. Most recently she scored Claudia Legge’s Negotiating The Mind, an art piece exploring feelings of anxiety and claustrophobia through an underwater world. As a singer-songwriter she writes wry, dark, and sharply observed narratives of modern life. Her intricate guitar and vocal melodies draw on a wide range of ethnic and historical styles giving her music a timeless quality She frequently performs her music at poetry events around London. Her long awaited debut EP is forthcoming this September 2019

Let Me Tell Ya a Little about ….MISS V

Let me tell you a bit about myself & my music,

I was singing before I was born – sometimes people don’t understand,

It’s my medication – it’s my meditation – …

I was born in London

Singer, Songwriter, Dancer and Gymnast, Rebecca has performed with Mariah Carey, Earth Wind and Fire and Alexander O'Neil

Ear Smoke are gatherings of poets and musicians to celebrate words in flight. Starting by Conrad Gamble 4 years ago in London, it has had over 30 shows across London and abroad, currently enjoying a residency at Laylow in West London. 

Tonight’s Lineup includes.

Alan Moon (Alice St Clair Erskine) - Acclaimed actress and poet Alice a regular on the BBC on both the TV (A Royal Romance, The Crimson Fields), and the wireless, a regular on BBC 3 Words and Music and Radio 4's Homefront. She has performed her poetry internationally, including performances in Italy Greece and New York. Under her pseudonym Alan Moon, she recently performed a majestic show at Brasserie Zedel and has become editor of "The Print and the Poem" for the Royal Academy.

Grace Pilkington - Writer and Poet From Shepherds Bush. She write about taboo subjects such as mental illness and women's issues. She has wowed at literary night across London and has performed on the BBC World Service Se is part of poetry collective Little Grape Jelly that has performed at Hay and Aldeburgh and has a collection published by Eyewear. She is regular at Ear Smoke. Incisive, inimitable and hilarious.

DeerHart - Nancy Trotter Landry and Bob Pearson.

The beguiling two piece comprised of singer Nancy Trotter Landry and guitarist Bob Pearson will attend to your soul.

Hosted by Conrad Gamble - Author and Poet and Filmmaker. Conrad has performed both nationally and internationally at various festivals. At home highlights include Sunday Papers Live, Cheltenham Poetry Festival, Secret Cinema (Dead Poets Society), Blacks Club, Somerset House, The Listeners Project and abroad across Europe. He has been commissioned to write for Suitcase Magazine and the Book of Everyone. His (non poetry book) 'For the Love of London' came out nationally two years ago.

Ian Birch has edited, launched and re-launched multiple publications in London, New York, Milan and Sydney. Most recently, he was editorial director at Hearst Media on both sides of the Atlantic, overseeing classic brands such as Harpers Bazaar, Esquire, Elle and Cosmopolitan. Ian won the Mark Boxer Award for lifetime achievement at the British Society of Magazine Editors Awards. His first book, UNCOVERED: Revolutionary Magazine Covers (Cassell, 2108) is an oral history of some of the industry’s most impactful covers told in the words of the people who created them.

He will be joined by Melissa Denes, Editor-in-Chief of the Guardian Weekend Magazine and Paul McNamee, Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue.

Melissa Denes has been the editor of Guardian Weekend magazine since 2013, winning the British Society of Magazine Editors award for best newspaper magazine in 2018 and 2015, and the Press Award for best newspaper supplement in 2016. She was the Guardian’s arts editor from 2006-2013.

Paul McNamee was appointed UK Editor of The Big Issue in summer 2011, the first time The Big Issue had a single editor across all national, regional and online editions.  He started out on local newspapers in Northern Ireland, before co-founding Belfast-based Irish music magazine Blank with Colin Murray. He moved to the NME in London and following a number of years there he began writing for a series of newspapers and magazines, amongst them the Daily Mirror, The Guardian, Belfast Telegraph and The Irish Times. He was named British Editor of The Year in 2013 and 2016 by the BSME (British Society of Magazine Editors) and Magazine Editor of the Year three times by leading publishing industry body PPA Scotland. He served a two-year term as Chairman of PPA Scotland.

The Big Issue delivered an annual sales increase for three consecutive years in 2015, 2016 and 2017. It currently sells 78,449 copies per week across Britain.

Heathcote Ruthven is a writer and one third of New River Press. He has edited poetry anthologies including Year Of The Propaganda Corrupted Plebiscites and When They Start To Love You As A Machine You Should Run. His writing has appeared in International Times, The Idler, The Indepedent, Vice, and others. He is currently working on I Am Not Who You Think I Am: a collection of poems and prose poems by people who have experienced homelessness in collaboration with Miranda Gold and Crisis

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, as was The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, her previous book. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017. Her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships, will be published in May 2019.

She has spoken on the modern relevance of the classical world on three continents, from Cambridge to Chicago to Auckland. She writes for the Guardian. She is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4: reviewing for Front Row and Saturday Review, appearing as a team captain on three seasons of Wordaholics, and banging on about Juvenal whenever she gets the chance.

Four series of her show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, is broadcast on Radio 4. Her documentary on the Defining Beauty exhibition at the British Museum, Secret Knowledge: The Body Beautiful aired in 2015 on BBC4 in the UK and on BBC World News everywhere else. She was a judge for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, the 2013 Man Booker Prize, and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Born in London and raised in Vancouver, Tom Rachman was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press stationed in Rome, then an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He is the author of three novels, the international bestseller The Imperfectionists; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers and The Italian Teacher, as well as a short stories collection, Basket of Deplorables. He lives in London.

Candice Carty-Williams is an author, book marketer and sometime journalist based in south London. Born in 1989, the result of an affair between a Jamaican cab driver and a Jamaican-Indian dyslexic receptionist, Candice worked in the media before moving into publishing aged 23. In 2016, Candice created and launched the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize, before moving to Vintage Books.

Her debut novel, Queenie, has stormed bestseller lists and been called a politicised Bridget Jones. We look forward to welcoming her to Curious in August.

Nimco Ali was born in Somalia and grew up in the UK, where she studied at Bristol University and went on to work as a civil servant and an independent training consultant. She is the co-founder, with psychotherapist Leyla Hussein, of Daughters of Eve, a non-profit organisation set up in 2010 to support and protect young women from communities that practise female genital mutilation (FGM). FGM is a set of procedures that involve partial or total removal of external female genitalia, including the clitoris and labia, and sometimes also infibulation – narrowing of the vaginal opening by creating a seal by sewing up the labia. It is carried out before puberty, and often on girls very much younger.  FGM, which can prove fatal and often leads to medical complications, has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but was formerly considered a mainly cultural issue. Nimco Ali and Daughters of Eve have successfully campaigned for it to be recognised as child abuse.

Currently she is an ambassador for #MAKERSUK. MAKERS is AOL’s women’s leadership platform that highlights the stories of ground-breaking women today to create the leaders of tomorrow. In 2014, she was awarded Red Magazine’s Woman of the Year award, and also placed at No 6 on the Woman’s Hour Power List. Most recently she was named by The Sunday Times as one of Debrett’s 500 most influential people in Britain, and as one of the Evening Standard’s 1000 most powerful. Nimco is a trustee for Women for Refugee Women and the Emma Humphreys Memorial Prize and is a founding member of the Women’s Equality Party.

Paula’s talent for writing was first noticed when she won the BBC National Get Writing competition and her comic story was read by Bill Nighy on Radio 4.  The opening chapters of her teen thriller, ‘The Truth About Celia Frost’, led to her becoming a winner of ‘Undiscovered Voices 2010’ run by The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators British Isles.   Celia Frost was nominated for 11 literary awards.  It was selected as the winner of the Leeds Book Award (2012), Sefton Super Reads Award (2012), and the Nottingham Brilliant Book Award (2013). 

Her second novel, ‘Blood Tracks’, was published in 2013. It was shortlisted for several literary awards, winning ‘The Rib Valley Book Award 2014’.

Paula’s stories for adults have been published in a number of anthologies of contemporary fiction.  She was commissioned to write a story for Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature’s anthology, ‘These Seven’.

Paula is proud to be a writer in residence in a secondary school for the national literacy charity First Story.  She is also regularly invited into secondary schools around the UK to do author talks and workshops.  Paula is delighted to be the patron of the East Midlands School Library Association as she’s a big fan of school librarians and the great work they do to get students reading.