Next: The Poetry Festival 24-26 September 2010

Home  
Next Festival  
Previous Festival  
Tickets & Contacts  
Monthly Draw  
Merit Award 
Schools  
Writers  
Sponsors & Links  

Venue: Thoresby College on the Quayside PE30 1HX with the big green buoy outside. Parking on Quayside, 
Boal Quay or on the Saturday Market Place. For a location map, click here.

Each session lasts around 90 minutes, in two halves. During the interval, you can enjoy some refreshments while you browse the bookstall of works by the Festival's poets - all of whom are happy to chat and sign their books.

For a reminder of the Fiction Festival, 2010, click here. 
For accommodation information, click here.

John Welch, Jo Shapcott, Kit Wright 
Agnes Meadows, Penelope Shuttle,
Selima Hill, John Lucas, Amarjit Chandan
Valérie Rouzeau with Susan Wicks
Dannie Abse, John Fuller
and celebrating his 80th birthday, 
Anthony Thwaite 

The weekend at a glance

Friday 24th September 7.30pm

President of the Poetry Society
Jo Shapcott

John Fuller

Selima  Hill
 

Sunday 26th September 11.00am

Dannie Abse

John Welch

and from France
Valérie Rouzeau
with her translator Susan Wicks
 

 Saturday 25th September 11.00am

Discussion by the writers
Poetry in Translation

The panel of writers will discuss what point
there may be in trying to penetrate
another culture through translation
 

Sunday 26th September 3.00pm

The Life and Poems of
Peter Porter (1929-2010)

Chaired by John Fuller
with contributions from the writers



The afternoon closes with

The Draw

for our unique raffle prize, a book handwritten
by all the writers in the festival

     
Festival tickets at the door
or in advance from:
Tony Ellis at Messrs Hawkins,
19 Tuesday Market Place, King's Lynn
01553 691661 (office hours)
01553 761919 (other times)

Saturday 25th September 3.00pm

Agnes Meadows

John Lucas

and from India
Amarjit Chandan
with his translator John Welch
 

Saturday 25th September 8.00pm

Kit Wright

Penelope Shuttle

and celebrating his 80th birthday
Anthony Thwaite
 

JO SHAPCOTT
Jo Shapcott was born in London in 1953. She was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin and is today Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Her awards for collections include the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize. She has also

twice won the National Poetry Competition. Jo has worked with musicians on collaborative projects, and in 1997 had her poems set to music in The Creatures Indoors, premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra, and has presented poetry programmes for BBC Radio. Her book Tender Taxes includes her versions from Rilke’s French poems (2001). Her latest, Of Mutability (2010), is published by Faber. She is considered one of Britain’s leading poets, and is President of The Poetry Society.

JOHN FULLER
Poet, novelist and critic John Fuller was born in 1937 in Kent and was educated at New College
Oxford. He won the 1960 Newdigate Prize for his poem 'A Dialogue between Caliban and Ariel'. During the 1960s he lectured at the University of Manchester and became Fellow and

tutlor at Magdalen College, Oxford. His award-winning published work includes the poetry collections Epistles to Several Persons (1973), and Stones and Fires (1996). The Space of Joy was published in 2006, and shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. Song and Dance, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was published in 2008. John Fuller is also a respected novelist: Flying to Nowhere (1983) won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Oxford.

SELIMA HILL
Now resident in Dorset, Selima Hill was born in London in 1945 but grew up in a family of painters in England and Wales. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1986, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Exeter University, 2003-6. She won first prize in the Arvon International

Poetry Competition with one of several extended sequences in Gloria: Selected Poems (2008). Her most recent collections from Bloodaxe are The Hat (2008) and Fruitcake (2009) which includes Violet, a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the Forward Prize, Whitbread Poetry Award, and TS Eliot Prize. Bunny (2001) won the Whitbread Poetry Award, was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was also shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

AGNES MEADOWS
Poet Agnes Meadows lives in London but is as passionate about travelling as she is writing. She was a journalist for several years in the UK and Mexico and has ten times been the
Featured Poet at the Austin International Poetry Festival. She gives workshops at festivals and

events all over the world, most recently in Zurich, Singapore and Malaysia (from Kuala Lumpur to King’s Lynn.)
Agnes also runs successful poetry events in London, including ‘Loose Muse’, the capital’s only regular event for women writers at the Poetry Society’s Poetry Cafe. Her poetry works include Woman (Selected Poems, 2005),
At Damascus Gate on Good Friday (2005) and This One Is For You (2008), published by Flipped Eye.
Agnes has been poetry advisor for Channel 4 TV and has produced CDs of her poetry to music.

JOHN LUCAS
The distinguished poet and critic, John Lucas is Professor Emeritus at the Universities of Loughborough and Nottingham Trent. He is the author of many academic works, including studies of Dickens, John Clare, Arnold Bennett, Ivor Gurney and several books on English

poetry. He has published seven books of his own poetry, most recently, A World Perhaps: New and Selected Poems (2002) and The Long and the Short of It (2004). John’s new collection, Flute Music, makes extraordinary poetry out of ordinary life - a pint of beer, a cup of coffee, jazz, poetry and the history of 'Bloody England'. He has played cornet with many jazz groups in the Nottingham area, where he has lived since 1964. He runs Shoestring Press.
"Lucas is a dab hand at social observation. The language crackles with colloquial art.“ The Guardian.

AMARJIT CHANDAN
Amarjit Chandan was born in Kenya in 1946 and now lives and works in London. Alongside his five collections of published poetry, he has translated over thirty anthologies of poetry, fiction
and creative non-fiction by, among others, Brecht, Neruda and John Berger in Punjabi.

Amarjit was one of ten British poets selected by Andrew Motion for the National Poetry Day in 2001. English versions of his poems have appeared in various collections including Being Here (1995, 1999, 2005); and in magazines such as the Poetry Review, Artrage, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Amarjit has received numerous literary awards for his work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 from the Government of the Punjab, India; and
the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the Panjabis in Britain Group. His most recent collection is
Sonata for Four Hands (2009) published by Arc.

 KIT WRIGHT
 A welcome return to King’s Lynn for poet and author Kit Wright. Born in 1944 and educated at  Oxford University, he now lives in London. He lectured in Canada, before working as Education  Officer at the Poetry Society in London (1970-75). He was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at

Cambridge University (1977-9) and was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1985. His first collection for adults, The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So (2000). Wright’s latest book of poetry is The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009). Kit is not only a comic poet - his work is also often described as introspective, sensitive, thought-provoking and serious.

PENELOPE SHUTTLE
Penelope Shuttle was born in 1947 and lives in Cornwall, where it rains inspiration.
She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1974, and her first full-length poetry collection was The Orchard Upstairs (1980). This was followed by seven further collections, including: Building

a City for Jamie (1996); and A Leaf Out of His Book (1999). Three of her collections were Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her 2006 collection, Redgrove's Wife, shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize, is a book of lament and celebration about the life and death of her husband, Peter Redgrove, and the loss of her father. She is also the author of five novels and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2007. Her latest collection, published by Bloodaxe, is Sandgrain and Hourglass, (2010).

 ANTHONY THWAITE
 Acclaimed writer and poet Anthony Thwaite was born in Chester, 1930 and now lives in Norfolk.  He has worked as a broadcaster, reviewer, critic and academic, as a producer for BBC radio,  literary editor of The Listener, Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and

literary editor of The New Statesman. In 1986 he was Chairman of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction. Together with Andrew Motion, Thwaite is literary executor of the estate of Philip Larkin and edited Larkin's Collected Poems (1988). His own most recent Collected Poems was published in 2007. He was awarded the OBE in 1990 and is married to biographer and children's book writer, Ann Thwaite, both of whom are familiar faces to regular Poetry Festival-goers.

DANNIE ABSE
Dannie Abse, poet, author, and playwright, was born in Cardiff, 1923. He has written and edited more than sixteen books of poetry and remains a writer of great distinction - last year’s publication of New Selected Poems (2009) marked the 60th anniversary of the of his first poetry

collection. He also writes fiction: The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (2002) was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest book of poetry, Running Late (2007), received the Roland Mathias Prize. The Presence (2008) was the winner of the Wales Book of the Year.

 JOHN WELCH
 Born 1942, John Welch lives in Hackney, East London. In the 1970s, he was involved with  Wallpaper, bringing together work by poets, visual artists and musicians, and founded The Many  Press, to publish books, pamphlets and broadsheets. Welch helped run the South Asian

Literature Society, and edited an anthology of South Asian stories. The publication of his Collected Poems in 2008 provides a welcome retrospective of the forty year writing career of this significant poet. Visiting Exile (2009), returns to his longstanding preoccupation with the inner city and its diversities.

VALERIE ROUZEAU
Valérie Rouzeau was born in 1967 in Burgundy, France and now lives in a small town near Paris,  Saint-Ouen, well known for its flea-market. She has published a dozen collections of poems, including Pas revoir (le dé bleu, 1999), Apothicaria (Wigwam, 2007) and recently

Mange-Matin(l'idée bleue, 2008). She has also translated Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes and the photographer Duane Michals. She is the editor of a little review of poetry for children (from 5 to 11 years old) called 'dans la lune' and lives mainly by her pen through public readings, poetry workshops in schools, and radio.

 SUSAN WICKS
 Born in Kent, 1947, Susan Wicks read French at the universities of Hull and Sussex. She has  lived and worked in France, Ireland and America and has taught at the University of Dijon,  and the University of Kent. She is the author of five collections of poetry including 'Singing

Underwater' (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and 'The Clever Daughter' (1996), which was shortlisted for both the T.S.Eliot and Forward Prizes. She is also author of two novels and a memoir. Her most recent book of poems, 'De-iced', was published by Bloodaxe in 2007. She appears at King's Lynn as translator of Valérie Rouzeau.