Poetry Club: Don Paterson & Nick Laird

(This is a past event and is no longer running)

Poetry

We are delighted to welcome Don Paterson and Nick Laird for a spell-binding evening of poetry in our atmospheric and intimate auditorium – the fourth in the 2023 series which marks the 10th anniversary of our poetry series.

Books will be available for purchase and signature in the bar after the reading where all are welcome to stay for a drink and chat to the poet.

Don Paterson is the author of numerous works of poetry and non-fiction; his writing has won many awards, including the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, all three Forward Prizes, and the T. S. Eliot Prize on two occasions. He was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2009; he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and for many years taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is now Emeritus Professor of Poetry in the School of English. From 1997 to 2022, Paterson was poetry editor at Picador.

“One of the few poets writing today whose work combines postmodern playfulness with a sense of yearning for the transcendental.” – The Independent

Nick Laird was recently awarded The Forward Prize for best poem for the titular poem of his latest collection, Up Late. Nick has won many awards across all five of his published poetry collections including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Somerset Maugham Award, a Guggenheim fellowship and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Feel Free was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott Award. He is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast.

“Laird cracks open the poetry of sensitivity to reveal a raw sense of politics and injustice ” – Philip Terry, Guardian

Poetry Club is supported by the TS Eliot Foundation.