Featuring Hannah Hodgson, Angela Graham & Ben Wilkinson
Date: Saturday30th July
Time: 4:00pM
Venue: Theatre
Price: £5.00 / £3.00
This event will include BSL interpretation
New and exciting poetry…
Seren presents the eagerly anticipated first collection 163 Days from Hannah Hodgson, Same Difference, the second collection from Ben Wilkinson and Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere, a collaborative collection between Angela Graham, Phil Cope, Mahyar, Viviana Fiorentino, Csilla Toldy and Glen Wilson.
163 Days (Seren 2022) is Hannah Hodgson’s first full length poetry collection, chronicling her longest period spent in palliative care. Hannah is a poet living with life limiting illness, which means she is a palliative care and hospice user.. In December 2021, she was awarded the honour of a Diana Legacy Award in further recognition for her campaign work.
Same Difference (Seren 2022) is the ambitious new collection from poet and critic Ben Wilkinson, which finds its author experimenting with poetic voice and dramatic monologue. Carefully crafted yet charged with contemporary language, the book brims with everyone from cage fighters to boy-racers, cancer patients to whales in captivity.
The collaborative volume Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere (Seren 2022) is “A necessary and urgent response to the world’s increasing crises…” (Robert Minhinnick) and it asks, how we can save the earth, ourselves and others? How valid is the concept of a ‘holy’ place these days? Are any values still sacrosanct? We all deserve peace and security but can these be achieved without exploitation?
Hannah Hodgson is a poet living with life limiting illness meaning she is a palliative care and hospice user. Her work has been published by BBC Arts, The Poetry Society and Magma, amongst other outlets. She is a 2021 winner of the Poetry Business New Poets Prize. She is a recipient of a 2020 Northern Writers Award for Poetry. Hannah has worked with both NHS England on policy guidance and the charity Together for Short Lives. She has spoken with MPs on her experience of the NHS, as well as The Royal Society of GPs. In recognition of her activism Hannah received a prestigious Diana Award in 2021, given in the name of Diana, Princess of Wales. In December 2021, she was awarded the honour of a Diana Legacy Award in further recognition for her campaign work. Her debut collection 163 Days was published by Seren in March 2022.
Angela Graham is from Belfast who has worked as a film maker and screenwriter in Wales. Angela turned to writing full-time a few years ago and now divides her time between Wales and Northern Ireland. Her debut poetry collection Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere is a collaborative collection in which she invited five other writers from Wales and Northern Ireland to contribute a poem each written in collaboration with her. In this way, the book embodies the hosting aspect of sanctuary – a theme with many facets. Her debut collection of short stories A City Burning was published by Seren in 2020 and was longlisted for Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Photo credit: Natasha Hirst.
Ben Wilkinson was born in the English Midlands and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. His poems, criticism and journalism regularly appear in national publications including The Guardian, The Poetry Review, The New Statesman, The Spectator, and the TLS. In 2014 he won both a Northern Writers’ Award and the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition. He lectures in creative writing at the University of Bolton. His debut collection, Way More Than Luck, was published in 2018 and highly commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. A His second collection Same Difference was published by Seren in 2022.
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