Event with acclaimed poet Holly Pester

to say we’re excited about welcoming the poet and author, Holly Pester, back to the shop would be a gross understatement. As huge fans of her work – her novel, The Lodgers; her poetry collection, Comic Timing – we’re in a heightened state of anticipation to hear Holly read from and discuss her new poetry volume, Cafés, in conversation with the award-winning author, Nell Osborne.

Here’s more from Fitzcarraldo:

Welcome to Cafés! Somewhere to eat and forget about work, where we can meet friends and not think about love, where we can meet lovers and be too nervous to eat. In Holly Pester’s unique lyric, the café becomes a structure of fantasy and language exploring life at the pressurized edges.

In each iteration, the café remakes itself through the people who pass through it. A worker tries to run a café franchise. A lover sits in the corner, waiting. A woman mourns a friendship while contemplating age and childlessness. An artist tries to launch an art café and hosts an open mic… (Cafés is) a stylish political intervention and an elegy for communal space.’

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from one of the most original poets of the age.

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‘Holly Pester is a genius.’ Kate Briggs, author of The Long Form

‘Holly Pester makes the world sing… She reminds us that poetry is a social activity, an expression of faith in the possibility of connection – with other people, with the world, with happiness – that feels, in our historical moment, like a form of resistace.’ Ben Eastham, author of The Floating World

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Holly Pester is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre at the University of Essex. Her books and works include Ecloques for Idle Workers (BBC Radio and Distance No Object, 2018), Comic Timing (Granta, 2021), which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Lodgers (Granta, 2024).

Nell Osborne is a poet and novelist. Her poetry pamphlet, Thank You For Everything was published by Monitor Books in 2024, and her next pamphlet, Seances Near Me, is forthcoming from Spite Press in 2027. Her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books, 2025), jointly won the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize in 2026. Judge Marina Benjamin described the novel as ‘administrative noir in the orbit of body horror, as if Ottessa Moshfegh had written Severance.’