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Poetry Club: Glyn Maxwell, Caroline Bird And Zaffar Kunial

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

Our popular contemporary poetry series, Poetry Club, returns to The Coronet Theatre in our intimate auditorium featuring readings from Glyn Maxwell, Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial.

Glyn Maxwell

Highly acclaimed poet, playwright and author Glyn Maxwell reads poetry at The Coronet Theatre including from his latest collection How The Hell Are You, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2020. Glyn has given readings at The Coronet Theatre a number of times and his stage adaptation of Karen Blixen’s Babette’s Feast premiered here in 2017.

Glyn Maxwell’s other books of poetry include Pluto, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2013, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2004. His book-length poem Time’s Fool is in development as a feature film with Fox Searchlight. In 2012 he published On Poetry, a popular critical guidebook for the general reader, and in 2016 its fictional sequel, Drinks With Dead Poets. His plays include Liberty, which premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2008, and The Lifeblood, which was British Theatre’s ‘Best New Play’ at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2004. He is also a librettist and novelist. During a ten-year spell in the USA he taught at Amherst, Princeton, Columbia and NYU, and in the UK has taught at the Universities of Warwick, Essex and Goldsmiths, and currently teaches on the MA at the Poetry School. Glyn Maxwell is currently chair of the judges for the TS Eliot Prize 2022.

‘The most compelling, original, charismatic and poetic guide to poetry that I can remember. A handbook written from the heart by one of the true modern masters of the craft.’ – Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate on On Poetry

CaROLINE BIRD

Caroline Bird is a poet and playwright. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. Her sixth and most recent Carcanet collection, The Air Year, was published in February 2020 and won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. 

Her 2017 collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was shortlisted for Most Promising New Playwright at the Off-West-End Awards, and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her theatre credits include: The Trojan Women (Gate Theatre, 2012), The Trial of Dennis the Menace (Purcell Room, 2012), Chamber Piece (Lyric Hammersmith, 2013), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Northern Stage, 2015), and The Iphigenia Quartet (Gate Theatre, 2016).

‘Her phrasemaking is sublime… it’s superb’
Tristram Fane Saunders, February Telegraph Book of the Month 2020

zaffar kunial

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading of ‘Hill Speak’ at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem ‘The Word’. His debut collection, Us, was published by Faber in 2018 and was shortlisted for The TS Eliot Prize. It was followed by the pamplet, Six.

‘…there’s something about the precise, thoughtful, unhurried way in which he interrogates language that marks him out as a unique talent. As the Scottish poet Jackie Kay has said, he is a real find.’ The Scotsman

Caroline Bird and Zaffar Kunial are fellow judges with Glyn Maxwell for this year’s TS Eliot Prize.

Poetry Club is supported by The TS Eliot Foundation

 

Performance:

Thur 25 Nov 7:30pm

Auditorium

Tickets:

£15 standard
£12 concessions

Running Time: Approximately 70 minutes

Performance:

Thur 25 Nov 7:30pm

Auditorium

Tickets:

£15 standard
£12 concessions

Running Time: Approximately 70 minutes

Additional Information

Glyn Maxwell Photo – Anna Leader