Manchester City of Literature are delighted to announce that Esther Koch will be representing us for Slamovision 2023!

Esther is a 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 Words 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.

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. 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. Currently, she is working with youth charity 42nd Street on a reflective piece of poetry about the effects of lockdown on young people.

Esther writes unreservedly about mental health and social injustice, both locally and internationally. Esther is influenced by folklore and ancestry. 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.

A huge thanks to everyone who entered our Slamovision callout, the standard was high and it’s brilliant to see so many poets keen to represent our city. The Slamovision 2023 Grand Finale will be held in Nottingham on Tuesday 5th December if you’d like to attend to support Esther, you can get tickets below.

The ‘Eurovision for the Spoken Word’ has been contested since 2019 and is aimed at increasing cultural participation within individual cities as well as showcasing local talent on an international stage.

Twelve Cities of Literature, including Manchester, are participating in Slamovision 2023: Dublin (Ireland), Exeter (UK), Iowa City (US), Kuhmo (Finland), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Manchester (UK), Melbourne (Australia), Québec City (Canada), Reykjavik (Iceland), Tartu (Estonia), and Vilnius (Lithuania). A virtual round of voting will open soon.