Date/Time: Thursday 6 October 2022, 7.00pm to 8.00pm

Venue: Culture Lab, Newcastle University

The Poetry Book Society presents its Autumn Showcase with Don Paterson and Alycia Pirmohamed reading and in conversation with Bill Herbert. Introduced by PBS Manager Alice Mullen.

Don Paterson is Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews and poetry editor at Picador MacMillan. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including the PBS Autumn Recommendation The Arctic (Faber, 2022), and also works as a guitarist and composer. Patterson has twice won both the Whitbread/Costa Poetry Prize (2003, 2015) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (1997, 2003). He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.

'Dynamic, interrogative and unsettling; crafted yet open-ended; fiercely smart, savage and stirring - from the get-go, Paterson's poetry has been essential reading.' Guardian

Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut full-length collection Another Way to Split Water (Polygon, 2022) is a PBS Autumn Recommendation following pamphlets Hinge and Faces that Fled the Wind. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BPOC Writers Network and currently teaches creative writing at Cambridge University. She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2020 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award.

'These are poems for a global age, where we move between cultures with apparent ease and might have several lands – or none – which we call home. Pirmohamed describes expecting a lesson from the two elk which cross her path during a hike in “Elegy with two elk and a compass” and, though they gallop away, she gets the message. “The elk, in their way, have mastered living by mastering letting go”. The Scotsman

Bill Herbert is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Free event, and all very welcome.