The Night Alphabet – Joelle Taylor

Award winning poet Joelle Taylor performs a staged reading from her acclaimed debut novel, The Night Alphabet. Hackney, 2023 – a woman walks into a tattoo parlour.  Her body is covered with tattoos, but she wants to add a final inking to her gallery – a thin line connecting the haunting images of her body art together.  If you follow the line, what extraordinary stories will the images tell you?  Set across histories and geographies, illustrated with animations of the tattoos, The Night Alphabet is a furious, gripping, dystopian story and a bold investigation into violence, resilience and women’s stories.  The performance is directed by acclaimed theatre maker Neil Bartlett.

Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent, C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 TS Eliot Prize and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors.

Neil Bartlett has made theatre everywhere from the Royal Vauxhall Tavern to the National Theatre including Orlando and a live version of Derek Jarman’s film Blue.

“The Night Alphabet is a kaleidoscopic novel that daringly enters worlds that are outside our own.  Joelle is a rare and brilliant writer…”  Jasmine Palmer