Tuesday 4 November – 6.00 pm
Blackwell’s Bookshop
53-62 South Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1YS
Join us on 4 November 2014 at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Edinburgh for an evening of poetry celebrating the Next Generation Poets 2014.
The event will feature performances from Alan Gillis and Helen Mort from the Next Generation Poets 2014. They will be joined on the night by special guests Jacob Polley, from the 2004 List, and Scottish performance poet, Harry Giles.
Free Entry (Booking essential)
To reserve a seat please call 0131 622 8218 or email events.edinburgh@blackwell.co.uk
Alan Gillis was born in Belfast and lives in Scotland where he is Lecturer in English at The University of Edinburgh. His debut collection, Somebody, Somewhere, won the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection in 2004, and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His second collection Hawks and Doves was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2007 and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Here Comes the Night was published by Gallery Press in 2010, and his fourth collection, Scapegoat, is published by Gallery Press in October 2014.
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield in 1985. She has published two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, the shape of every box and a pint for the ghost, a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2010. Five-times winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, she received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007 and won the Manchester Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust. Division Street, Helen’s first collection, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2013, was a PBS Recommendation and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.
Born in 1975, Jacob Polley’s first collection of poetry, The Brink (2003), was a PBS Choice and went on to be shortlisted for the T S Eliot, Forward and the John Llewellyn Rhys prizes. He has received a Somerset Maugham Award for his fiction and his latest book of poetry, The Havocs (2012), was shortlisted for the Forward and T S Eliot Prizes and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
Harry Giles is a writer and performer based in Edinburgh. He founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word and co-directs the performance platform ANATOMY. His pamphlets Visa Wedding (2012) and Oam (2013) are published by Stewed Rhubarb; he was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion; and in 2014 was one of six shortlisted for the inaugural Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. His participatory theatre has toured festivals across Europe, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia) and CrisisArt (Italy). His performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian’s best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category.
