Monitor Books X Sean Roy Parker

The Longest Day
Monitor Books X Sean Roy Parker
Saturday 21 June 2025

The Longest Day is an event in Forma's Peveril Gardens organised in collaboration with Monitor Books marking this year’s Summer Solstice. Featuring a residents writing workshop, readings, drinks, plants and shade. With readings from: Matthias Connor, Alan Fielden (& friends), Remi Graves, Will Harris, Jessica Higgins, frank r jagoe, Nell Osborne, and Sean Roy Parker.

In the afternoon, Sean Roy Parker will also run Plant Friends, a free writing workshop for North Southwark residents. Plant Friends will use slow observational activities as a way of getting to know the plants in Peveril Gardens and unlock new levels of intimacy with our plant and insect neighbours.

Matthias Connor was born in London and grew up in Derbyshire. He left school without any qualifications. He discovered his cultural life of writers, artists, filmmakers and musicians through the people he met skateboarding in Manchester before moving to London in the early nineties. He’s worked as a postman, in a laundrette, in a clothes shop, in a nightclub, in a kitchen, in a video shop and as a childminder. At the age of forty he returned to education to study to be a nurse. Loose Fit, his first book, was shortlisted for the Prototype Prize and will be published by Actually in Summer 2025. He is currently working on a book with Monitor about his relationship with the outsider Manchester artist, Black Lodge.

Alan Fielden is a British-Korean writer, performance maker, and poet. Winner of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award for Marathon, with JAMS, co-produced by the Barbican. Recent productions include Container at New Diorama Theatre, April 2025. His writing has been published by Prototype, If A Leaf Falls, Minor Literatures, Broken Sleep Press, and a collection of his plays is forthcoming with Monitor.

Remi Graves is a poet and drummer. A former Barbican Young Poet, their work has been commissioned by St Paul’s Cathedral, Barbican and BBC Radio 4. They have performed at Tate, Cheltenham Literature Festival, and more. Remi’s debut pamphlet with your chest (2022) was published by fourteen poems. Remi was the winner of 2024 Prototype Prize (short form category) for their work coal, which will be published by Monitor in 2025.

Will Harris is a London-based writer. He is the author of the poetry books RENDANG (2020) and Brother Poem (2023), both published by Granta in the UK and by Wesleyan University Press in the US, and the essay Mixed-Race Superman (Peninsula, 2018). He has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He co-translated Habib Tengour’s Consolatio (Poetry Translation Centre, 2022) with Delaina Haslam.

Jessica Higgins is an artist and writer. Working primarily in performance, film, sound and text, she is interested in the voice and its entanglement in social infrastructures, as well as the form and question of performance. She has shown her work at, or as part of, Radiophrenia; Edinburgh Art Festival; Supernormal; Glasgow International Festival; David Dale Gallery; Castlefield Gallery; LUX Artist Moving Image Festival and Glasgow Film Festival. She also writes essays, fiction and poetry about other artists, music and films, and is one half of the band Guests.

frank r jagoe is an autistic artist who works across text, performance and sculpture. Their work examines how experiences of illness, madness and gender are informed by specific Western, imperialist narratives around the ‘human’ and its relationship to language, monstrosity and animality. This often manifests as dialogues with other-than-humans: the ocean, a mirror, a catfish, a blue plastic arm, a deep-sea anglerfish. Jagoe’s work has been published in The Happy Hypocrite, Hotel, EROS Journal and Artes Mundi Journal, among others. With Sharon Kivland they have edited two anthologies, ON VIOLENCE (2018) and ON CARE (2020), published by MA BIBLIOTHÉQUE. They were a Wales in Venice 10 Fellow 2022–23 and part of the Freelands Fellowship 2021–22. They have recently shown work at Chapter, Cardiff (2024); g39, Cardiff; and Site Gallery, Sheffield (all 2023), the Drawing Room, London; Mostyn, EKKM, Tallinn; and Kim?, Riga (all 2021), and Wysing Arts Centre and CCA Goldsmiths (2020). They are currently based in London.

Nell Osborne published her first poetry pamphlet, The Canine Redeemer Has Entered The Bungalow, in 2021 with Just Not. Her most recent pamphlet Thank You For Everything, is published by Monitor. From 2018-2020, Nell co-ran the experimental poetry commission series, No Matter, based in Manchester. Her debut novel, Ghost Driver, is forthcoming with MOIST.

Sean Roy Parker is an artist, writer, and landworker whose eco-critical work is generated through nourishing daily relationships with (more-than-) humans in the struggle for food justice and land access. He has recently had projects at Piccalilli Gallery (London), Two Queens (Leicester), Primary (Nottingham), and Pols (Valencia, Spain). For three years, he was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-National Coal Board and Steiner School building in Derbyshire. He is a 2024 recipient of an Axis Fellowship and a Paul Hamlyn Visual Artist Award. stewarding (Monitor, 2024) is his first collection of poetry.

Monitor Books is a small press based in London which publishes necessary, idiosyncratic writing in bespoke editions.

www.monitorbooks.co.uk