King’s Lynn Poetry Festival: 25 – 27 September 2009

King’s Lynn Norfolk, UK

The Poetry Festival 25-27 September, 2009

Full details of the Poetry Festival will be posted on their website once they become set for more info see:

http://www.lynnlitfests.com/nextfestival.asp

Festival tickets at the door
or in advance from:
Tony Ellis at Messrs Hawkins,
19 Tuesday Market Place, King’s Lynn
01553 691661 (office hours)
01553 761919 (other times)

Introducing the poets of the 2009 Poetry Festival:

Peter Porter

Porter was born in Australia in 1929. Bookselling and advertising work brought him to London in the 1950s, leading to him becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in the 60s. He published his first collection of poetry, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten in 1961. There followed his most critically acclaimed work, The Cost of Seriousness in 1978, and prizes followed: The Automatic Oracle (Whitbread Prize 1988), the Gold Medal for Australian Literature (1990), Max Is Missing (Forward Poetry, best Collection, 2002) and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2002. Porter’s latest collection is Better Than God (2009).

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Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of York and London. Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published as a result of the two poets jointly winning the Poetry Business Prize in 1991. Since then, she has written six poetry collections, including: The Country at My Shoulder (1993, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award), Carrying My Wife (2000), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; How the Stone Found its Voice (2005) inspired by Kipling’s Just So Stories and most recently, Europa (2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. Also published in 2008, Split World includes poems from her first five collections. Moniza Alvi now tutors for the Poetry School and lives in London. In 2002 she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry. http://www.moniza.co.uk

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Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published four poetry collections. Between her debut collection, Heart of a Deer (1998) and her latest, The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) are, most notably, The Zoo Father (2001) and The Huntress (2005). Both were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were both Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. She was named, in 2004, by the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit has won numerous writers’ awards. She tutors at Oxford University, Tate Modern, Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School, and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University.
http://www.pascalepetit.co.uk

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Eli Tolaretxipi

Born in 1962, Tolaretxipi still lives and works in San Sebastian, Spain. She has published two poetry collections in Spanish and her poetry has also been translated into French and Italian. Amor muerto naturaleza muerta (Past Love Still Life) was published in 1999 and was praised for its poetics of unease. Her second volume Los lazos del número (The Loops of the Figure) appeared in 2003. Structurally dazzling, its poems deal with perception, dream and the nature of poetry. Tolaretxipi’s poetry is similar in texture to that of some of the English-language women poets she has translated into Spanish, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath among them. She appears at King’s Lynn with her translator, Philip Jenkins.

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Kit Wright

Poet and children’s author Kit Wright was born in 1944 and educated at Oxford University. He lives in London. He lectured in Canada, before working as Education Officer at the

Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1985. Wright’s books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000). Wright’s latest book of poetry is The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009).

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Michael Hulse

Hulse has won many awards for poetry, not only the first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice), but also the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and Cholmondeley Award. He is back reading in Kings Lynn via tours of the US and Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Europe. Hulse’s poetry has been described by Simon Armitage as “compelling” and “moving”, by Peter Porter as “very accomplished indeed”, and by C. K. Stead as “clever, various and engaging”. In 2002 a book of new and selected poems appeared as Empires and Holy Lands, and a new collection is due soon. Currently he teaches poetry and short fiction in the Creative Writing Programme of Warwick University’s English department.

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John Hartley Williams

John Hartley Williams was born in Cheshire, in 1942. He grew up in London and the universities of Nottingham and London. Since 1976 he has been a teacher at the Free University of Berlin. His first collection of poems was Hidden Identities (1982). Subsequent collections include: Bright River Yonder (1987), Spending Time with Walter (2001), Mystery in Spiderville (2003) and Blues (2004). Williams’ work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and he has contributed reviews and articles to many poetry magazines. His most recent work is Café des Artistes (2009). http://www.johnhartleywilliams.de

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Lachlan Mackinnon

Born in Aberdeen in 1956, Lachlan Mackinnon was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. He teaches English at Winchester College and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the national press. His first award was the Eric Gregory Award in 1986, preceeding his first collection Monterey Cypress (1988). The Coast of Bohemia followed in 1989. His poems Staying With Friends and Elegy are included in New Writing 7: An Anthology (1998). After writing critical studies of modern poetry and Shakespeare, he saw the publication of his latest collection of poems, The Jupiter Collisions. His accessible poems are described as modest, meditative, without hyperbole or rhetoric. He lives with poet, Wendy Cope.