Previous: The Poetry Festival 25-27 September, 2009 at Thoresby College
Their potted biographies appear further down this page.
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The Poetry Festival's Silver Jubilee was a great success and we thank everyone that attended, read or supported in whichever way. For those that missed it, the Festival's founder, Tony Ellis, was presented with a specially bound anthology contributed to by so many of our visiting poets from over the years. The book was co-ordinated and edited entirely by poet and friend, Michael Hulse. |
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The weekend at a glance |
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Moniza Alvi |
From Russia |
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Discussion by the writers |
Inspiration and Enlightenment The Draw for our unique raffle prize, a book handwritten |
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Lachlan Mackinnon |
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Celebrating his 80th birthday |
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Introducing the poets of the 2009 Poetry Festival:
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Moniza Alvi Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of |
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York and London. Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published as a result of the two poets jointly winning the Poetry Business Prize in 1991. Since then, she has written six poetry collections, including: The Country at My Shoulder (1993, shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award), Carrying My Wife (2000), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; How the Stone Found its Voice (2005) inspired by Kipling's Just So Stories and most recently, Europa (2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize. Also published in 2008, Split World includes poems from her first five collections. Moniza Alvi now tutors for the Poetry School and lives in London. In 2002 she received a |
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Pascale Petit Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published four poetry collections. Between her debut collection, Heart of a Deer (1998) and |
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her latest, The Treekeeper's Tale (2008) are, most notably, The Zoo Father (2001) and The Huntress (2005). Both were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were both Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. She was named, in 2004, by the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit has won numerous writers’ awards. She tutors at Oxford University, Tate Modern, Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School. She will be reading from her new collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo,
due in 2010. |
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Eli Tolaretxipi |
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Italian. Amor muerto naturaleza muerta (Past Love Still Life) was published in 1999 and was praised for its poetics of unease. Her second volume Los lazos del número (The Loops of the Figure) appeared in 2003. Structurally dazzling, its poems deal with perception, dream and the nature of poetry. Tolaretxipi’s poetry is similar in texture to that of some of the English-language women poets she has translated into Spanish, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath among them. She appears at King’s Lynn with her translator, Philip Jenkins. |
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Kit Wright |
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Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1985. Wright's books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000). Wright’s latest book of poetry is The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009). He can be “funny, moving and serious. Sometimes, all in the space of a single poem”. |
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Michael Hulse |
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“compelling" and “moving”, and by Peter Porter as “very accomplished indeed”, and has won him various awards, including first prize in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice), and Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards from the Society of Authors. He has edited literary quarterlies and a literature classics series, co-edited the best-selling Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry, and has translated more than sixty books from the German, among them works by Goethe, W. G. Sebald, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, and this year Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics). |
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John Hartley Williams John Hartley Williams was born in Cheshire, in 1942. He grew up in London and the universities of Nottingham and London. Since 1976 he has been a teacher at the |
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Free University of Berlin. His first collection of poems was Hidden Identities (1982). Subsequent collections include: Bright River Yonder (1987), Spending Time with Walter (2001), Mystery in Spiderville (2003) and Blues (2004). Williams' work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and he has contributed reviews and articles to many poetry magazines. His most recent work is Café des Artistes (2009). www.johnhartleywilliams.de |
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Lachlan Mackinnon |
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for the Times Literary Supplement and the national press. His first award was the Eric Gregory Award in 1986, preceeding his first collection Monterey Cypress (1988). The Coast of Bohemia followed in 1989. His poems Staying With Friends and Elegy are included in New Writing 7: An Anthology (1998). After writing critical studies of modern poetry and Shakespeare, he saw the publication of his latest collection of poems, The Jupiter Collisions. His accessible poems are described as modest, meditative, without hyperbole or rhetoric. He lives with poet, Wendy Cope. |
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Annie Freud Annie Freud was born in London in 1948 and was educated at the Lycee Francais de Londres, later studying English and European Literature at Warwick University. |
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Since 1975, she has worked intermittently as a tapestry artist and embroiderer. She didn't start writing poetry until the late-1990s, but her first full collection, The Best Man Who Ever Was (2007), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and went on to receive the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award. Freud has been described as a poet who writes with "real gusto". A Guardian review talks about the "obvious delight" that she takes in language, describing her work as a "magpie-like collection of odd and beautiful words and phrases". She is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud, maternal grand-daughter of sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, and the great-grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud. |
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Valérie Rouzeau |
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poems, including Pas revoir (le dé bleu, 1999), Va où (Le Temps qu'il Fait, 2002) and more recently Apothicaria (Wigwam, 2007) and Mange-Matin (l'idée bleue, 2008). She has also published volumes translated from 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, radio broadcasts and translation. |
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Susan Wicks Born in Kent in 1947, Susan Wicks read French at the universities of Hull and Sussex, and wrote a thesis on André Gide. She has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America |
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and has taught at the University of Dijon, University College Dublin 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 short-listed for both the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and she was included in the Poetry Society's 'New Generation Poets' promotion in 1994. A short memoir, 'Driving My Father', was published in 1995. She is also the author of two novels. Her most recent book of poems, 'De-iced', came out from Bloodaxe in 2007. She appears at King's Lynn as translator of Valérie Rouzeau. |
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Larissa Miller Born in 1940, Larissa Miller is a major Russian lyrical poet and author of many short stories essays and articles in periodicals, and of 14 books, one in English translation (Dim and |
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Distant Days). She is a member of the Union of Russian Writers since 1979, and of the Russian Pen-Centre since 1992, and was short-listed in 1999 for the State Prize of the Russian Federation. Many poems by Larissa Miller have been set to music in the UK by Helen Chadwick. In 2003, 49 of Larissa Miller's poems were put together as a theatrical Poetical Performance which played at various Moscow theatres. She graduated from the Foreign Languages Institute in Moscow and worked as a teacher of English, but since 1980 she has been teaching a women's musical gymnastics system named after its creator, the renowned Russian dancer Lyudmila Alexeeva. |
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Richard McKane Born in 1947, Richard McKane read Russian at Oxford, his Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova appearing in 1969. He lived in Turkey for six years in the 70s working on an |
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archaeological dig in Kandahar, Afghanistan for some of this time. In 1978 he was awarded the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University where he met his former wife Elizabeth, with whom he later he brought out Mandelstam's Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks. For over eighteen years, he worked as an interpreter from, and into, Turkish and Russian at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. As a poet, he has had two bilingual books published in Turkey, Turkey Poems and Coffee House Poems, and a selection, Amphora for Metaphors in New York. He now lives in the provinces, concentrating on his poetry and his translation, which brings him to King's Lynn with Larissa Miller. |
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