Poetry At The Print Room

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

Sean Borodale, Elaine Feinstein and Mimi Khalvati.

For our next event on Tuesday 3 March, we are delighted to welcome SEAN BORODALE reading from HUMAN WORK – A POET’S COOKBOOK;  ELAINE FEINSTEIN reading from her new collection, PORTRAITS; and MIMI KHALVATI reading from THE WEATHER WHEEL.

Sean Borodale is one of 2014’s Next Generation Poets, and he will be reading from his second collection, Human Work – A Poet’s Cookbook, a stunning collection about the rites and rituals of cooking by one of Britain’s best new poets which will be out with Jonathan Cape in February 2015.

Sean Borodale works as a poet and artist and lives in Somerset, and is currently Creative Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was selected as a Granta New Poet in 2012, and his debut collection Bee Journal was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the T S Eliot Prize and the Costa Poetry Award in 2013. Mighty Beast, his documentary poem for Radio 3 won the Radio Academy Gold Award in 2014 for Best Feature or Documentary. His topographical poem Notes for an Atlas was recommended by Robert Macfarlane in the Guardian Summer Books 2005. It was performed in 2007 at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, directed by Mark Rylance, as part of the first London Festival of Literature.

‘Sean Borodale is without doubt the most exciting new poet I have read since Alice Oswald. His Bee Journal raises the bar for us all and announces a thrilling new voice in British poetry.’ – Carol Ann Duffy

Now in her 80s, Elaine Feinstein is a poet, novelist, and biographer, and she will read from her intimate new collection, Portraits, which will be published by Carcenet in February 2015, in which describes writers she has known, including the Russian poet Bella Akhmadulna, and those she has loved only through their work, such as Sylvia Plath.

Elaine Feinstein grew up in Leicester and read English at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has published over thirty books, including fiction and biography, and written for radio and television. She has received  many prizes, including a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, Society of Authors’, Wingate and Arts Council Awards, the Daisy Miller Prize for her experimental novel The Circle, (long-listed for the ‘lost’ Man Booker prize in 2010) and an Honorary D.Litt from the University of Leicester. She has travelled across the world to read her poems, and her books have been translated into most European languages, and into Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her versions of the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, a New York Times Book of the Year, have remained in print since 1971. She was given a major grant from the Arts Council to write her most recent novel, The Russian Jerusalem, a phantasmagoric mix of prose and poetry (Carcanet, 2008). She has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, of which she is a Fellow, as a judge for most of the current literary prizes, and  as Chair of the Judges for the T.S.Eliot Award.

‘She is an extremely fine poet. She has a sinewy, tenacious way of penetrating and exploring the core of her subject that seems to me unique.’ – Ted Hughes

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran. She grew up and has lived most of her life in England. She trained at Drama Centre London and has worked as an actor and director in the UK and Iran.

All of the poems in her latest collection, The Weather Wheel, are written in 16 line couplets, reminiscent of both the sonnet and the ghazal, a twinning of East and West, as Mimi says. Elegies for her mother, who died whilst she was writing the book, anchor the sections. The central image is of a wheel spinning and Mimi Khalvati takes the day’s weather, the seasons and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love.

She has published eight collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, including The Weather Wheel, The Meanest Flower, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Financial Times Book of the Year, and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and, most recently, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her work has been translated into nine languages and she received a Cholmondeley Award in 2006. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.