Hive poets at Rotherham Civic for Off the Shelf Festival

Such a lovely evening on Friday at Off the Shelf Festival of Words at the beautiful Rotherham Civic. Hive poets Safia Khan & Freya Bantiff performed wonderful sets alongside the brilliant Caroline Bird and Otis Mensah. Hosted by our very own Sile Sibanda, who co-hosted the 10th Birthday of the Youth Word Up the night before! If you haven’t been to Rotherham Civic, you really need to go. It’s such a gorgeous theatre with great staff and so welcoming.

Safia Khan is a winner of the New Poets Prize 2021. She is a member of Hive Young Poets and an alumnus of Doncaster Young Writers. She has been published in places like The North, BATH MAGG, Introduction X: The Poetry Business Book of New Poets and several Hive anthologies including Surfing the Twilight and Halfway Smile. She is currently studying medicine.

Freya Bantiff is a member of Hive Poetry. She is the winner of the Canterbury Poet of the Year 2021, the Walter Swan Poetry Prize (for 18-25) in 2020, and the Timothy Corsellis Poetry Prize in 2017. Freya’s poems and stories have been placed in numerous competitions since 2010 including Myslexia, the Ilkley Literature Poetry Festival and Foyle Young Poet of the Year. Her poems were chosen to tour Guernsey as part of the Guernsey Literary Festival’s ‘Poems on the Move’ exhibition in 2014 and 2015 and she won first prize in her category of the Wicked Young Writers Award in 2014.