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| BSPF 10- George Szirtes, Rita Ann Higgins, Peter Bennet |
Organiser: Bristol Spring Poetry Festival
Start time: 8.00pm Fri 30 Apr 2010
Website:http://www.poetrycan.co.uk
Telephone Number: 0117 933 0900
Description: George Szirtes, Rita Ann Higgins, Peter Bennet
“It took a long time to get used to English words, the words that would have to do the opening up for me. I write now because I hope such openings are still possible, because I love the act of writing, and because marvellous poems by others have moved and delighted me to the extent that I have taken them for truth. It takes a lot of playful effort to squeeze any meaning out of words: the squeezing is all.”
George Szirtes
George Szirtes, a popular and highly entertaining reader of his own poetry, was born in Budapest in 1948, and came to England with his family has a refugee after the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. He was educated in England and trained as a painter. He writes from a midnight holdvilágnál crossroads of cultures, languages and art forms. He has published several collections of poetry, the first of which The Slant Door won the Faber Prize. Other books include The Budapest File; An English Apocalypse; Reel, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2004; New & Collected Poems and The Burning of the Books and other poems was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2009. He has worked as a translator of Hungarian literature and co-edited Bloodaxe’s Hungarian anthology The Colonnade of Teeth.
Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. One of eleven children, she left school at fourteen, and was in her late twenties when she started writing poetry. A true original, anarchic, gutsy, heart-warming, flame-stirrer. Ruth Padel described her poems as ‘...a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective, with wonderful rhythms that effortlessly incorporate direct speech. A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues.’ She has published eight books of poetry, including Sunny Side Plucked: Selected Poems (Poetry Book Society Recommendation), An Awful Racket and Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems.
Peter Bennet lives with his wife in a remote cottage near Kirkwhelpington amid the outstanding beauty of the Northumbrian landscape and the strange natural acoustics of the Northumbrian hills. His richly imagined poems blend past and present, forgotten histories with myth and botany, fairytale with fact to brew poems that are contemporary, darkly funny and original. Goblin Lawn: New and Selected Poems was published in 2005 and his latest collection, The Glass Swarm was shortlisted for the 2008 T S Eliot Prize.
Admission: £7.00
Address: Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol
BS1 4QA
Email: [email protected]
Accessibility: fully accessible
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