RABBITBOX: Wayne Holloway-Smith in conversation with Andrew McMillan

  • DATE

    19 March 2026

  • TIME

    6:30 pm to 8:00 pm

  • AGES

    All ages welcome

  • PRICE

    £4 (Or free admission with advance purchase of the book.)

  • VENUE

    Blackwell's Bookshop Manchester
    University Green, 146 Oxford Rd, Manchester, M13 9GP

  • TICKET INFO

    Book tickets

  • THEME

    Poetry

    Publishing

    Read

  • ORGANISER

    Blackwell's Bookshop

We are thrilled to welcome Wayne Holloway-Smith to Blackwell’s to discuss RABBITBOX, a transfixing, heart-rending work which follows a mother and her young son living under the shadow of an all-consuming domestic threat.

About the Book:

24 Coalbrook Street. The house is trembling with a father’s anger. It makes a rabbit of a young boy, sends him burrowing into a wardrobe, and leaves his mother standing hapless and mute over the kitchen sink. In this house, how far can a mother’s comfort travel?

From the safety of his hiding place, from the magnitude of his fear, a young girl appears offering a way out. Taking him by the hand, reaching through time, she leads him elsewhere; a mother’s love dreaming him away from their reality to the promise – beautiful yet flickering – of a river.

Haunting, precise and tender, RABBITBOX heralds a major new work from one of Britain’s most exciting writers.

About the Author:

Wayne Holloway-Smith is the author of two poetry collections, Alarum (2017) and Love Minus Love (2020), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Ledbury Munte Prize for Best Second Collection. He won The Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2016 and The National Poetry Competition in 2018. He currently lives in London and is Editor of The Poetry Review.