Esther Koch
Poet
Esther Koch will open the afternoon programme at the Quality of Life: Remaking the post-industrial city day conference in Manchester on Friday 4 October 2024
Esther Koch is a multiple slam-winning-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 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 and won Slamovision 2023, the world’s foremost international poetry slam.
She has produced work for festivals such as Sounds From The Other City, The Ted Hughes Festival, Manchester International Festival, and Resistance Is My Mother Tongue, and for Stand Up To Racism and Manchester youth charity 42nd Street. 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.
She writes unreservedly about mental health and social injustice, both locally and internationally. Esther is influenced by folklore, mythology 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.
