Please join Carcanet Press to celebrate the launch of New Poetries VIII, edited by Michael Schmidt and John McAuliffe. From the first New Poetries anthology, published in 1994, through to this eighth volume, the series has showcased some of the most engaging and inventive new poets writing in English from around the world. Many have gone on to achieve notable success: Kei Miller, Sinéad Morrissey, Caroline Bird, Sophie Hannah, Tara Bergin and Vahni Capildeo among them.

New Poetries VIII showcases the work of some of the most exciting new poets writing in English. With poets from the UK, USA, Ireland, Scandinavia, Afghanistan and more, the book introduces important new voices from BAME and LGBTQ communities, ranging in age from 20 to 80 years old.

Launch Event Programme

Five launch events will run each Thursday evening between February 18th – March 18th. Each event will include readings and discussion. During the readings  the text will be shown on screen so that you can read along. Audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions.

To Book: Please follow the links below to book for each event individually.

Cost is £2 for each event.

February 18th, 2021

Parwana Fayyaz
Joseph Minden
Chad Campbell
Jennifer Edgecombe
Jenny King
Register here & join the Facebook event.

February 25th, 2021

Colm Tóibín
Padraig Regan
Conor Cleary
Victoria Kennefick
Joe Carrick-Varty
Register here & join the Facebook event.

March 4th, 2021

Charlotte Eichler
Suzannah V. Evans
Jason Allen-Paisant
Rebecca Hurst
Register here & join the Facebook event.

March 11th, 2021

Isobel Williams
Christine Roseeta Walker
Tristram Fane Saunders
Holly Hopkins
Register here & join the Facebook event.

March 18th, 2021

Stav Poleg
Benjamin Nehammer
Nell Prince
Maryam Hessavi
Register here & join the Facebook event.

Registration for the online events will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Please note that there are limited places for the readings, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact Carcanet Press. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration via the links above.

About the readers

Parwana Fayyaz was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1990. From the age of seven to sixteen, she was raised in Quetta, Pakistan. After finishing high school in Kabul, she enrolled in an English language immersion program and subsequently began her undergraduate studies in Chittagong, Bangladesh. She transferred to Stanford University and earned both her B.A. in 2015, with a major in Comparative Literature (with Honors) and a minor in Creative Writing (Poetry) under the supervision of late Eavan Boland, and her M.A. in Religious Studies in 2016. She moved to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD in Persian Studies at Trinity College in September of 2016 and completed a thesis titled, Poetry and Poetics: the Sufi Eye and the Neoplatonic Vision in Jamis Salaman va Absal, in 2020. She took up Junior Research Fellowship as the Carmen Blacker Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University in October 2020.

Joseph Minden was born in Cambridge. He studied English Literature before working at the Scott Polar Research Institute’s Polar Museum, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. He has travelled the length and breadth of South East England. In all of Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire there is scarcely a place of historic interest or natural beauty to which he has not been. It was all too much for him. He is training to be an English teacher.

Chad Campbell was born and grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, and then in a town of about 500 people in Nova Scotia on the east coast of Canada. He got a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and English literature from York University and then an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Maytag fellow (the maker of washing machines) and a teaching fellow thereafter. He taught creative writing in the undergraduate department at the University of Iowa before moving to Manchester where he’s now completing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing. He was a writer in residence at the 2019 Jilin International Writing Program in China. Campbell’s first book, Laws & Locks, was nominated for a debut collection award and published in 2015 with Vehicule Press. His second collection is called Nectarine and is due out in Spring 2021.

Jennifer Edgecombe grew up in Cornwall and now lives on the Kent coast. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Ambit, Caught by the River, Lighthouse, PN Review and Wild Court. Her debut poetry pamphlet The Grief of the Sea was published by Broken Sleep Books.

Jenny King was born in 1940 in London and went to Godolphin and Latymer School, Hammersmith and then, after a three-month stay with an aunt in Canada – first in her home in Saskatoon and then on a camping trip across the plains to the Rockies – went to Newnham College, Cambridge where she gained a degree in English. She then taught for three years in Shrewbury before marrying at Christmas 1967-8 and moving to Sheffield, where her husband was a university lecturer. Here she taught at various schools, with some time off when their two children were small. Having enjoyed many family holidays, as well as going with the children for a three-month stay in California where her husband had a fellowship at a research library, in retirement they also took several long-haul trips including to South Africa, China and India. She did an M.A. in Contemporary Poetry at Sheffield University soon after retiring, which greatly increased her awareness of recent poetry. They finally moved to a flat in 2019 from the house in which they had lived for nearly fifty years.

Colm Tóibín is an acclaimed novelist, his books including The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; The Testament of Mary; and Nora Webster, as well as  story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. Three times shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.

Padraig Regan is a poet from Belfast. They are the author of two pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award.

Conor Cleary is from Tralee, Co. Kerry and lives in Belfast. His work has appeared in The Tangerine, Poetry Ireland Review, The Stinging Fly and Virginia Quarterly Review. In 2018 he was the winner of the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His debut poetry pamphlet, priced out, was published by The Emma Press in 2019.

Victoria Kennefick is a poet, writer and teacher from Shanagarry, Co. Cork now based in Co. Kerry. She holds a doctorate in English from University College Cork and studied at Emory University and Georgia College and State University as part of a Fulbright Scholarship. Her research on the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Frank O’Connor was also funded by an IRCHSS Scholarship and a MARBL Fellowship. Her pamphlet, White Whale (Southword Editions, 2015), won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition and the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. She won the 2013 Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize and many of her poems have also been anthologised and broadcast on national radio stations. A recipient of a Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, she has received bursaries from Kerry County Council and Words Ireland. She is a co-host of the Unlaunched Books Podcast and is on the committee of Listowel Writers’ Week, Ireland’s longest-running literary festival.

Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-born Irish writer who lives in London. He is the author of two pamphlets, Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019) which won the 2018 New Poets Prize, and 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in the New Statesman, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Magma, and elsewhere. He is co-founder of bath magg, and a book reviewer for PN Review. In 2019 he was selected by Poetry Ireland as one of Ireland’™s emerging poets – for the Introductions Series.

Charlotte Eichler grew up in Hertfordshire and now lives near Leeds. Her poems have appeared in publications including PN Review, The Rialto, The Island Review and Stand. In 2017/18 she was a Poetry London mentee with Vahni Capildeo, and in 2018 her debut pamphlet, Their Lunar Language, was published by Valley Press. She holds a BA in English Literature and Russian and an MA in Norse and Viking Studies. She works as a bibliographer in the field of medieval studies.

Suzannah V. Evans has published poems in PN Review, Eborakon, The London Magazine, The Scotsman, Magma, and elsewhere, with others broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol. She has read her work at Keats House, London, where she organised Keats House: New Poets, for York Literature Festival and StAnza Poetry Festival, and at Underfall boatyard in Bristol, where she was poet in residence in 2019. She is the winner of the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and of a 2020 Northern Writers’™ Award from New Writing North. Her debut double-pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language was published with Guillemot Press in April 2020; her second pamphlet, Brightwork, is forthcoming with the same press in 2021. She is an AHRC-funded doctoral researcher in the department of English at Durham University.

Jason Allen-Paisant‘s writing (poetry, memoir, critical life writing) addresses issues of time, race, class, and the environmental conditions underpinning Black identity. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Granta, PN Review, Callaloo, Stand, among other places. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 2015 with a DPhil in Medieval and Modern Languages and joined the faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Leeds in 2016. Currently, he is a lecturer in Caribbean Poetry & Decolonial Thought in the School of English at Leeds, where he is also the Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He also serves on the editorial board of Callaloo: Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. Allen-Paisant has spent a lot of his life travelling. He has lived in five different countries and speaks seven languages. He is passionate about the outdoors and particularly about hiking, swimming and walking. He lives in Leeds with his wife and two year-old daughter.

Rebecca Hurst is a writer, theatre-maker and illustrator, and co-founder of the Voicings Collective, an ensemble that creates new music theatre. Their digital docu-opera, Walk Out of Yourself, created during the global pandemic and UK lockdown, was streamed on OperaVision.eu in August 2020. Rebecca’s poetry has appeared in various international magazines including: The Rialto, PN Review, Bath Magg, Agenda, Aesthetica, The Clearing, and Magma Poetry. Written with Zoe Palmer and Dani Howard, Robin Hood: an Opera in Three Courses premiered in London in February 2019. Rebecca has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Manchester and was artist in residence at the John Ryland’™s Library from autumn 2019 to spring 2020, during which time she worked on Speaking Russian in Coulsdon: Between Countries and Between Forms, a hybrid work that blends life-writing and travel-writing with poetry, fiction, and archival encounters.

Isobel Williams was educated at Woking Girls’ Grammar School and Somerville College, Oxford. She blogs about live-drawing on isobelwilliams.blogspot.com and  boulevardisme.blogspot.com. She has held solo exhibitions in London and Oslo, written articles, e.g. for ‘International Journal for the Semiotics of Law’ and ‘The Amorist’, and given talks at law and humanities conferences in the UK and abroad. She wrote and illustrated ‘The Supreme Court: a Guide for Bears’ in 2017 and is contributing a chapter to ‘Design and Visualisation in Legal Education’ (Routledge, 2021). Carcanet is publishing her illustrated selection of Catullus versions, ‘Catullus: Shibari Carmina’, on 25 March 2021.

Christine Roseeta Walker was born in Jamaica and lives in the United Kingdom. She began writing poetry and fiction whilst studying for her first degree at the University of Salford. In 2018, she enrolled on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester where her love for writing poetry flourished. She graduated with Distinction and was published that year with bath magg poetry magazine. The following year, her work appeared in PN Review and Wild Court. She has recently completed her debut novel, The Grass is Weeping, and is currently searching for an agent. She visits Negril, Jamaica at least once a year but lives in the Cheshire countryside, from where she writes and coaches Creative Writing and Poetry Writing.

Tristram Fane Saunders, 27, lives in his head and works as little as possible. His latest pamphlet is Woodsong (SmithDoorstop, 2019). He reviews poetry for newspapers and on the radio.

Holly Hopkins grew up in Berkshire, grew up even more in London and now lives in Manchester. Her debut pamphlet, Soon Every House Will Have One, won the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition and Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Holly has been an assistant editor of The Rialto. She has received an Eric Gregory Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship and was shortlisted for the inaugural Women Poets’™ Prize.

Stav Poleg’s poetry has been published on both sides of the Atlantic, including in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review and PN Review. She regularly collaborates with fellow artists and poets. Her graphic-novel installation, ‘Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning,’ created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her pamphlet, Lights, Camera, was published in 2017 by Eyewear. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’™s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry and has recently facilitated collaborative work between poets and filmmakers for the magazine. She teaches for the Poetry School, London.

Benjamin Nehammer is a former professional dancer from Copenhagen, Denmark, and was schooled as a classical dancer with The Royal Danish Ballet. He eventually left the company to pursue a degree in philosophy and comparative literature with the University of Copenhagen and the Freie University in Berlin. He now works in theatre, working with, among others, The Royal Acting House in Copenhagen. He lives with his wife, Minna, and son, Jacob.

Nell Prince lives in Lincolnshire and has had poems published in various magazines including PN Review, Perverse, and Measure. She was runner-up in the 2016 Jane Martin Prize, and in an email sent in 2013, Harold Bloom described the poem she sent to him as ‘˜authentically promising’™.

Maryam Hessavi is British Manchester-based poet and critic, with poems and reviews appearing in various publications. An alumna of the University of Manchester, she holds an MA in English Literature & Creative Writing with specialisms in Modernism and Linguistics. Maryam is Reviews Editor for The Poetry School, a Contributing Editor for Ambit, a Ledbury Critic and committee member for the Manchester-based poetry reading series Poets & Players.

Details on Carcanet Website