Poetry At The Print Room: Ruth Fainlight, Hannah Lowe & Richard Scott
(This is a past event and is no longer running)
The Best in Contemporary UK Poetry Featuring
Ruth Fainlight, Hannah Lowe and Richard Scott
Our atmospheric candlelit bar plays host to another unmissable evening for anyone who loves modern poetry. Enjoy readings from three celebrated UK poets, before joining them in the bar for a drink, where they will be signing copies of their books.
On Ruth Fainlight: Her New & Collected Poems, representing half a century’s work, asks us to read her writing life as a journey that never really ends, even with publication of a monumental achievement…an extraordinary maturity of voice and vision. The essential continuity of her work is immediately striking; the poems affirm her own sense of poetry (and life) as a constant happening, the past a perpetual present.’ – Fran Brearton, Guardian
‘Hannah Lowe is one of our very best young poets. Her new book Chan is every bit as good as her debut collection Chick… It is a book about memory and the construction of memories, unreliable memories, family memories, invented memories and make-believe, along with the brilliant If You Believe poems.’- Andy Croft, Morning Star
On Hannah Lowe’s poetry: ‘these are moving and memorable poems’- Times Literary Supplement
On Richard Scott: ‘Outstanding . . . This is the most impressive debut since Andrew McMillan’s Physical’- Literary Review
‘….if you ever get the chance to see Richard Scott read live, jump on that opportunity ASAP.’- Marie Claire
Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain’s most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966, and her retrospective, New & Collected Poems, in 2010. Her poems ‘give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events’ (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. She has published thirteen collections of poems, two volumes of short stories, and translations including the first book in English by the Portuguese poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Her translation of Sophocles Theban Plays, in collaboration with Robert Littman, came out from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2009. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has written libretti for the Royal Opera House and Channel 4 TV. Her New and Collected Poems appeared in 2010, and a new collection: Somewhere Else Entirely, was published last November.
Hannah Lowe’s first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was short-listed for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. She has also published three chapbooks: The Hitcher (2012); R x (2013); and Ormonde (Hercules Editions 2014). Her family memoir Long Time, No See was published by Periscope in July 2015 and featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Her second collection, Chan, was published by Bloodaxe. (2016). A new chapbook The Neighbourhood will be published in January 2019 (Outspoken Press). She is the current poet in residence at Keats House and a commissioned writer on the Colonial Countryside Project with the University of Leicester and Peepal Tree Press.
Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies including Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, Swimmers, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin) and Butt Magazine. He has been a winner of the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, a Jerwood/Arvon Poetry Mentee and a member of the Aldeburgh 8. His pamphlet Wound (Rialto) won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016 and his poem Crocodile won the 2017 Poetry London Competition. Soho (Faber & Faber) is his first book-length collection, and is shortlisted for The Costa Prize for Poetry and The T. S. Eliot Prize.