Time to Read and Cumbria Libraries are thrilled to host poet, Alan Baker on Tuesday 9 March at 7pm. One of eleven literature events for the New Words Festival, Alan will be reading and then will host a Q and A on creative writing.
UPDATE – tickets available now!
Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and has lived in Nottingham since 1985, where he has been the publisher at Leafe Press for the last twenty years, and editor of its associated webzine Litter. He has published several poetry collections, including Variations on Painting a Room: Poems 2000-2010 (Skysill, 2011), Letters from the Underworld (Red Ceilings, 2018) and Riverrun (Knives, Forks and Spoons, 2019). His latest collection is A Journal of Enlightened Panic (Shoestring, 2020). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi.
Alan Baker’s collection Riverrun is a sequence of sonnets about the River Trent. In Riverrun, Alan Baker is following in a long tradition of poets taking rivers as their inspiration.
“I started writing poetry in my teens, gave it up, then returned to it in my late twenties, but I didn’t publish my first, slim pamphlet until I was forty-two. I’ve published ten collections of poetry since then. Why do I write poetry? Because I love it, always have – not writing it I mean, but poetry itself, reading it out loud, hearing it read, reading it silently, and I’ve loved it since I was a youngster enamoured of G. M. Hopkins and Robert Frost. So I wanted to “be in that number” as the song goes, and learn the art.” Alan Baker – Creative Writing at Leicester blog
Knives, Forks and Spoons Press is an independent publishing house based in Newton-le-Willows. Established by Alec Newman in 2010, the press publishes avant-garde and experimental poetry, full collections, pamphlets and anthologies. Riverrun is available from the KFS Press website.
The event will be held through Zoom. Tickets will be available from Cumbria Libraries. Stay tuned for the link! After you register, you will receive an email with the log-in details. The New Words Festival is made possible through public funding from Arts Council England.