Poetry Club: Ella Frears, Salena Godden & Glyn Maxwell

We are delighted to welcome Forward Prize-shortlisted Ella Frears, Indie Book Award winner Salena Godden and multi-award winner Glyn Maxwell for a mesmerising evening of poetry in our intimate candlelit bar as part of our ever-popular Poetry Club.

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 poets.

The Coronet Theatre is grateful to the T. S. Eliot Foundation for the continued support of our poetry events.

Ella Frears

Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Goodlord is currently shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her first collection Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Ella has been Poet in Residence for Tate St Ives, the National Trust, Royal Holloway University physics department, John Hansard Gallery and the Dartington Trust’s grade II listed gardens, among others. In 2023 she was a Creative Fellow for Exeter University’s environmental history department. She is currently RLF fellow for the Courtauld Institute of Art. Ella hosts Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.

Showing all the control of voice one would expect from a poet of her rare skill, Ella Frears has created in Goodlord, a book that is as funny as it is harrowing, and beautifully skewers the contemporary housing crisis while questioning the fundamental desires, drivers and disappointments that lie at the heart of our obsession with ‘property’.

★★★★★ “A trailblazing, genre-defying coup-de-maître of a book… a dark, addictive and deceptively erudite read.” (Daily Telegraph)

“A dazzling treat of a book, genuinely inventive, spiky and funny… Frears’ writing is like lightning – fast, crackling and illuminating.” (The Observer)

Salena Godden

Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. With Love, Grief and Fury, her latest poetry collection, contains love poems, for people and the planet. Grief poems brimming with compassion, mourning what was and contemplating what could be. And poems of fire and fury that tell the truth and inspire change and hope.

Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Film and TV rights for Mrs Death Misses Death have been optioned by Idris Elba’s production company Green Door Pictures. Godden has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film. Her poem Pessimism is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

“Told in sparse, affecting prose interspersed with poetry, Godden produces a thought-provoking novel that travels across time and place to question the value of life, the experiences of womanhood, and grief in all its forms.” (The Observer)

Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell grew up in Hertfordshire. His most recent collections are How The Hell Are You, shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2020, and The Big Calls, a broadside against recent UK government, featuring poems on the UK’s Covid response, the treatment of migrants, Afghanistan, Grenfell Tower, in the forms of Tennyson, Kipling, Rossetti, Oscar Wilde. He has recently published an amplification of his popular guidebook On Poetry, called Silly Games To Save The World, a book about poetry, psychology, politics and philosophy, which is freely available on Substack. His plays have been widely staged in the UK and USA. He is Head of Studies on the MA at The Poetry School.

“Glyn Maxwell covers a greater distance in a single line than most people do in a poem.” (Joseph Brodsky)