Poetry Club: Mary Jean Chan & Charlotte Shevchenko Knight

We are delighted to welcome Mary Jean Chan and Charlotte Shevchenko Knight 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.

Mary Jean Chan is the author of Flèche (Faber & Faber, 2019), which won the Costa Book Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for multiple awards, including the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize. Bright Fear (Faber, 2023), Chan’s second book, was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection and is currently shortlisted for the 2024 Writers’ Prize. A recent judge for the 2023 Booker Prize, Chan is currently the 2023-24 Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

Guardian Best Poetry Books of 2023: ‘Mary Jean Chan’s second collection, Bright Fear (Faber), heightens their trademark lyric elegance with an acknowledgment of the cost that poetry can demand: “I have been trained to plunder my own / thoughts, exploit my deepest resources”.’

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight is a poet of both British and Ukrainian heritage. She is a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for her powerful debut collection Food for the Dead about Ukrainian identity, giving a wider more accurate context to the current war as well as a more human focus, it was published by Jonathan Cape this February. Her debut pamphlet Ways of Healing was a winner of the New Poets Prize. Shevchenko Knight is currently undertaking a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University and is based in York.

‘An astonishing, lacerating, unforgettable debut, full of acutely evocative poems of food and famine in Ukraine, and of an adolescence lived in the shadow of trauma and extreme hunger. These are poems of deep beauty, furious survival, and abiding familial love.’ – Fiona Benson, author of Ephemeron

Poetry Club is supported by the T.S. Eliot Foundation