Join Verbose for a very special open mic, straight after Hollie McNish’s performance on the main stage at Band on The Wall… featuring Esther Koch and Zena Barrie!

Meet the Headliners

Esther Koch is a multiple slam-winning spoken-word and page poet from Salford. She is as a BBC Radio1 Xtra Words First finalist and is published in Own It! London’s accompanying anthology Use Word’s First. With her words, she closed the the Team GB homecoming ceremony at Wembley Stadium in 2021. More recently Esther performed her commissioned poem “Manchester is alive, I can assure you” at the One Young World 2022 summit in Manchester and won Slamovision, the world’s foremost international poetry slam.

She has produced work for festivals such as Sounds From The Other City, The Ted Hughes Festival, Manchester International Festival, Resistance Is My Mother Tongue and for Stand Up To Racism and Manchester youth charity 42ns Street. Esther has also produced educational content for BBC Bitesize.

More recently, she produced a collection of work entitled “Hoarfrost On Our Lips” which was exhibited alongside artwork at Manchester gallery Paradise Works.

She writes unreservedly about mental health and social injustice, both locally and internationally. Esther is influenced by folklore and ancestory. She is an alumni of Young Identity, Manchester’s celebrated spoken-word collective, with whom she collaborates and delivers workshops for young people in the community and within schools. You can see her perform regularly at venues across the North West.

Zena Barrie lives in Manchester and works in the arts organising all sorts of things whilst listening to the radio. Her debut ‘brilliantly funny’ novel Your Friend Forever was published in 2021. Zena is a former host of Verbose and has supported so many new voices across the city for many years.

Email verbosemanchester@gmail.com between April 1st – 3rd for a 4-minute slot. Confirmation will be by April 7th.

Artists on stage: 9.00pm
Curfew: 1.00am
Stage: The Bar