Poetry Club: David Harsent & Kit Fan
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We are delighted to welcome David Harsent and Kit Fan for a spellbinding 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.
David Harsent has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize. Night was triple short-listed in the UK and won the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A Broken Man in Flower, Harsent’s versions of the poems written by Yannis Ritsos while in prison camps and under house arrest, appeared in 2023. A new collection. Skin, has just been published. Harsent has collaborated with several composers, though most often with Harrison Birtwistle. Birtwistle/Harsent collaborations have been performed at major venues worldwide, including the Royal Opera House, the Salzburg Festival, the Concertgebouw and Carnegie Hall. He holds a number of fellowships, including Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Fellow of the Hellenic Authors Society. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.
“Harsent’s lines are incredibly supple, stretching and looping, snapping back, never coming unstuck. He is formal in the sense of being highly conscious of musical patterns, but his patterns are roomy and irregular, playing shape off against shapelessness with expert improvisation.” – Frances Leviston, Guardian
Praise for Loss:
“Harsent’s poem pulls off a strange feat, exploring the posthumous, while staying painfully alive. It becomes an experiment with absence — an exploration of what happens when you go missing to yourself.” – Kate Kellaway, The Observer
Kit Fan‘s third poetry collection The Ink Cloud Reader (2023) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. He is the author of two books of poems, As Slow As Possible (2018) and Paper Scissors Stone (2011). His first novel is Diamond Hill (2021). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and appointed as a Board member of the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in 2023. www.kitfan.net
“A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture…This is a book of pin-sharp, dazzlingly original images…creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.” – The Guardian
Click here to access priority booking by BECOMING A FRIEND so you can guarantee your seats for these incredible performances!