Poetry Club: Imtiaz Dharker, Sasha Dugdale & Camille Ralphs

Our ever-popular Poetry Club returns for an evening of readings in our intimate auditorium. For this instalment in the series, we are delighted to welcome award-winning poets Imtiaz Dharker, Sasha Dugdale and Camille Ralphs to read from their recent work – three of the UK best contemporary poets.

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.

Imtiaz Dharker

Imtiaz Dharker is a poet, artist and video film maker, awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, Chancellor of Newcastle University since 2020. Her seven collections, all published by Bloodaxe Books, include Over the Moon and the latest, Shadow Reader. Her poems have featured on BBC radio, television, the London Underground, Glasgow billboards and Mumbai buses. She has had eleven solo exhibitions of drawings and scripts and directs video films, many of them for non-government organisations working in the area of shelter, education and health for women and children in India.

“Imtiaz Dharker’s poetry shines a light in the dark. She is interested in how things work, in art, in history, in politics… You cannot hear her perform without being somehow transformed by the experience. Witty, wise, profound and moving, her work crosses continents. Carol Ann Duffy once said if there was to be a world laureate, it would be Dharker. Agreed.” (The Guardian)

Sasha Dugdale

Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. Her sixth book of poetry, The Strongbox, was published by Carcanet this year and was a Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month. Deformations (2020) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Derek Walcott Prizes. Her long poem ‘Joy’ won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem of 2016. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Dugdale’s translation of Maria Stepanova’s prose work In Memory of Memory was shortlisted for the International Booker and won the MLA Lois Roth Award. She has translated two of Stepanova’s poetry collections and work by a number of Russian-language women poets, including Elena Shvarts and Marina Tsvetaeva.

“This is poetry as a form of magic, which can bring together the disparate and give waking reality to fleeting dreamlike remembrances and unspoken, yet ubiquitous, fears in a fluid narrative. In other words, it is poetic myth at its best.” (The Independent)

Camille Ralphs

Camille Ralphs is a modern day metaphysical, her debut collection After You Were, I Am is extraordinary, heralding the arrival of a major new talent. Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her poems and essays have appeared in magazines including the New York Review of Books, The Poetry Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

“From the outset of After You Were, I Am, the reader embarks on an astonishing adventure… There is an eerie, quivering, steampunk depth to Ralphs’ poetry. The writing grounds itself in a type of earthy empathy for “the workers of this world”, as well as historical figures, but effortlessly straddles the spiritual and fantastic, too. This is poetry that delights in etymology and alchemical wordplay.” (The Guardian)