Featuring Carolyn Jess-cooke, cath drake, andrÉ mangeot & katherine stansfield. Hosted by zoË brigley.
Date: Saturday 30th July
Time: 14:30
Venue: Theatre
Price: £5.00 / £3.00
Published During the Pandemic is the daily event that seeks to give these poets the book launches they lost, with the inimitable atmosphere and energy of a live audience and stage. Daily showcase of poets and collections that were published during the pandemic, whose book launches were reduced to Zoom readings, audiences on mute, silent applause and bedroom backgrounds.
We Have To Leave The Earth (Seren 2021) is Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s third Seren poetry collection, which is both keenly political and deeply personal. With hints of a struggle with depression, a cherished child diagnosed with autism, there are also poems inspired by field work done for the Arctic at the Thought Foundation, aware of the man-made global warming.
The Shaking City (Seren 2020) is Cath Drake’s first full collection, following her award-winning Seren pamphlet Sleeping with Rivers. The Shaking City was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021 and is a metaphor for the swiftly changing precarity of modern life within the looming climate and ecological emergency.
Blood Rain (Seren 2020) is André Mangeot’s fifth collection. Resonant, complex, rich in heft and texture, these are mature poems that grapple with serious themes. André Mangeot’s Blood Rain introduces the natural world and its endangerment – key themes in a book that addresses some of the most troubling man-made issues now facing us all.
We Could Be Anywhere By Now (Seren 2020) is Katherine Stansfield’s second Seren collection. This collection is pointedly full of poems about placement and displacement. After a childhood on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, she moved to mid Wales, and this book explores relationships between these two places along personal and linguistic lines.
This event is kindly sponsored by:
Authors
Carolyn Jess-Cooke is an award-winning poet and international best-selling novelist who was born in Belfast. She is currently Senior Lecturer and Programme Convenor for the MLitt Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Carolyn’s first poetry collection, Inroads (Seren) received a Northern Writers Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie prize, an Arts Council Award, and was shortlisted for the New London Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in 2010. Her second collection BOOM! explores her experiences of motherhood and received a K Blundell award from the Society of Authors and a Northern Writers Award. She edited the bestselling anthology Writing Motherhood. Her latest collection is We Have to Leave the Earth (Seren 2021).
Australian poet Cath Drake‘s debut collection, The Shaking City (Seren) was highly commended in the 2020 UK Forward Prize and longlisted in the international Laurel Prize. It followed her pamphlet Sleeping with Rivers, a Poetry Book Society choice and winner of the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Cath has been published in anthologies and literary journals in Ireland, US, Australia. She received a second and commended in the UK Poetry School ecopoetry prize (now called Ginkgo) and was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. She hosts The Verandah, quality online poetry teaching and events, and is an award-winning journalist and mindfulness teacher with a specialism in environmental issues. cathdrake.com Photo credit: David X. Green.
André Mangeot’s poetry has appeared in the Spectator, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement and won many competitions, including the 2019 Robert Graves Prize. His latest collection, Blood Rain (Seren, 2020) combines the personal and the public to touch on some of the major challenges now facing the planet. He has also published two books of short stories, A Little Javanese and True North (Salt, 2008 & 2010) and recently completed a novel. He lives in Cambridge but heads for the Brecon Beacons as often as he can. www.andremangeot.com Photo credit: Sarah K. Hall.
Katherine Stansfield grew up in Cornwall and now lives in Cardiff. She has published two full length poetry collections and a pamphlet with Seren, the most recent of which is We Could Be Anywhere By Now which was selected by Wales Literature Exchange as a ‘Bookcase’ title: a book from Wales recommended for translation. Katherine is also a novelist: her historical crime series Cornish Mysteries has won the Holyer an Gof Fiction Prize and been shortlisted for the Winston Graham Memorial Prize. She co-writes a fantasy crime trilogy with her partner David Towsey, publishing as D. K. Fields. Photo credit: Two Cats In The Yard.
Zoë Brigley is editor of Poetry Wales, and poetry editor at Seren. She published three poetry books from Bloodaxe, most recently Hand & Skull (2019). All three were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her debut The Secret (2007) won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30 and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40.
This event is kindly sponsored by:
Books
