As well as being vigorously local to East Leeds, Chapel FM takes great pride in its international connections, in particular with Leeds’s twin cities, including our sister city in The Czech Republic: Brno.

Inverze Festival in Ostrava hosted Chapel FM Director of Words Peter Spafford last year. Chapel FM extends the same hospitality to its organiser, Ondřej Hrabal, fellow Czech poet Simon Leitgeb and Scots poet Colin McGuire.

Ondřej Hrabal is a Czech poet, the winner of the 2018 national poetry slam championship, author of three collections of poetry, and one children’s book. He performed his poetry at the largest demonstration in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution, attended by 300,000 people.

Šimon Leitgeb is a poet, a member of the Czech section of The PEN Club and Writers’ Association and the author of two poetry collections. Colin McGuire is a Glaswegian poet living in Edinburgh. He won the Out-Spoken Prize for Best Poem and Film for The Glasgae Boys in 2018. An excerpt from his memoir features in the Scottish Queer anthology Fierce Salvage. His new collection Ultraviolet is out with Bad Betty Press in 2026.