Poetry Club: Will Harris And André Naffis-Sahely

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

Our popular contemporary poetry series, Poetry Club, returns to The Coronet Theatre in our candlelit bar featuring readings from Will Harris and André Naffis-Sahely.

Poetry Club is supported by the TS Eliot Foundation

Will Harris

Will Harris is a London-based writer. His debut poetry book Rendang (2020) is published by Granta in the UK and Wesleyan University Press in the US. It was a Poetry Book Society Choice, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He co-edited the Spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan. He has previously collaborated with the artists Aisha Farr and Matthew Stuart.

“The poems in Rendang span the formal range of a mature poet but it’s Harris’s playfulness that really impresses. He has the confidence and stylistic mastery to jump between dreams and scenes like a character in a video game… If verse is a tightrope, Harris skips along it.” – Financial Times

ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY

André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, High Desert (Bloodaxe) will be published in June 2022. He is also the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is the editor of Poetry London.

High Desert is a psychedelic journal of end-times and an ode to the American Southwest, charting the region’s frail ecologies and hidden histories from the Spanish Colonial Era to the recent pandemic via a series of reflections on class, race, and nationalism.

“High Desert places Naffis-Sahely among our most indispensable poets, those who, throughout history, testify to the truths of poetry against the lies of violent, destructive, corrupt, oligarchic power.” ― Lawrence Joseph, author of A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020).