Events

John Burnside is a novelist, short story writer and poet. Paul Bachelor in the TLS describes him as ‘One of the most gifted poets writing today’. His collection Black Cat Bone won both the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. He has twice won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year award. His 2006 memoir A Lie About My Father was published to enormous critical acclaim, including the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He writes a monthly nature column for New Statesman and is a regular contributor to London Review of Books. He will be reading from his new book of poetry Still Life with Feeding Snake.

7.30pm Book here

Bernard O’Donoghue returns to poetryEast to talk about his new collection ‘The Seasons of Cullen Church’, shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize.

O’Donoghue has published seven collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, which won the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. He is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford and is currently translating Piers Plowman for Faber. ‘One of the most lyrical, amused, tragic and serious poets currently writing in English.’ PN Review.

Book here

Saturday 23rd September 

Once dismissed as ‘a minor lady writer’ Penelope Fitzgerald is now recognized as one of the finest British novelists of the last century. Hermione Lee discusses her biography of Fitzgerald, which won the 2014 James Tait Black Prize for Biography and was one of the New York Times best ten books. ‘Lee was a perfect choice as Fitzgerald’s biographer’ – Philip Hensher, The Guardian. Hermione Lee was made a Dame for services to literary scholarship.

Antony Gormley is one of Britain’s most successful sculptors, perhaps best known for the ‘Angel of the North’ that stands outside Gateshead

Solo exhibitions of his work have been held since 1981; in 1994 he won the Turner Prize. He was knighted in 2014 for services to the arts. He is a Royal Academician and a Trustee of the British museum.

Mon 30 Oct. 7.30pm

Andrew O’Hagan, editor-at-large of the London Review of Books and the author of five novels and numerous works of non-fiction, will join us on Saturday 10th June.

Three of Andrew O’Hagan’s novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize, and he has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He was on Granta magazine’s list of Best Young British Novelists in 2003. His next work of non-fiction, The Secret Life, about identity and personality in the digital age, will be published in June.

One of a series of evenings in association with the London Review of Books – also featuring Max Porter and Evie Wyld, James Meek and John Lanchester. ‘Best-ever’ subscription rates to the London Review of Books, one of the world’s foremost literary magazines, will be available at these events.

Book Here

Sinead Morrissey, Belfast’s first Poet Laureate, won the T. S. Eliot prize in 2014 for fifth collection, Parallax.

The chair of judges called the book ‘politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language’. She has also been shortlisted for the Forward prize, and was the youngest ever winner of the Patrick Kavanagh award. Poetry International has called her work ‘rooted in our everyday experiences yet often provocatively eerie’. She’ll be in conversation with Maitreyabandhu about her life and writing.

His non-fiction books include Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, and How to Speak Money. He is also the author of seven novels, including Capital, which was made into a TV series by BBC One. His memoir Family Romance recounts the story of his mother, a nun who walked out of the convent, changed her name and falsified her age, and concealed these facts from her husband and son until her death.

As well as the author of seven novels, James Meek is a distinguished journalist: his roles at the Guardian included Moscow bureau chief and religious affairs editor, and he has reported on the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, and is now a contributing editor to the London Review of Books. His novels include The People’s Act of Love, set in ‘the world of Kafka and Primo Levi, where the impossible keeps happening’.

Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers, a meditation on grief and loss and love, is ‘a perfect summation of what it means to lose someone but still to love the world’ (Guardian). Evie Wyld was on Granta magazine’s once-in-a-decade list of ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 2013. Her most recent novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Miles Franklin award, Australia’s most prestigious literature prize, while the Independent called her a ‘young writer with talent to burn’.

Celebrating the uniquely important journal founded by Ted Hughes that has brought the best international poetry into English since 1965.

Sasha Dugdale, its current editor and a previous guest of poetryEast, will join Maitreyabandhu to talk about the business of crossing borders in poetry, and Centres of Cataclysm, MPT’s anthology marking fifty years of the magazine and a poetic chronicle of a century of war. With Maitreyabandhu Sat 10 Dec. 7.30pm.