Topping the bill at the Cellar Bards monthly live literature event on Friday (September 26) is award-winning poet Jonathan Edwards.

For this month only the event will be held upstairs at Polly’s Bistro, High Street, Cardigan.

Jonathan’s first book of poems, My Family and Other Superheroes, was published by Seren earlier this year. The superheroes who appear in the collection include Evel Knievel, Sophia Loren, Ian Rush, Marty McFly, a bicycling nun and a recalcitrant hippo. All leap from the pages and jostle for position, alongside valleys mams, dads and bamps, described with great warmth.

Other poems focus on the crammed terraces and abandoned high streets where a working-class and Welsh nationalist politics is hammered out. This is a post-industrial valleys upbringing re-imagined through the prism of pop culture and surrealism.

Jonathan won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales New Writer’s Bursary in 2011, and in 2012 won prizes in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Basil Bunting Award. His work has appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Poetry Review, The North, Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review.

The Cellar Bards meet on Friday, September 26, upstairs at Polly’s Bistro, High Street, Cardigan. The events starts at 8pm. There is a fully stocked bar and plenty of comfy sofas. Entry is £3.

As always, there are open mic sessions open to writers of poetry, short stories, micro-fiction and novels. Just put your name down at the door if you want to read. If you don’t want to read, just go along and listen to a great variety of spoken word literature by many talented local writers.