Join Helen Mort, Alan Buckley, and Charles Foster in celebrating the launch of Carl Tomlinson’s poetry pamphlet Changing Places!About this Event
CARL TOMLINSON ~ was born in Lancashire – where his father’s family had farmed for 150 years – and moved to Wiltshire as a child. He has clear and fond memories of working with his grandfather – making hay, milking cows and lifting potatoes. He attended Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury before reading Spanish and French at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. By his 21st birthday he had buried half his immediate family.
Helen Mort says of Changing Places: “Carl Tomlinson is a writer of integrity, passion, wisdom and wit. ‘Changing Places’ gifts us a host of compelling characters – both people and places – and bids us listen to what they really have to say, not just what we want to hear. Tomlinson’s poetry is moving, musical and memorable.
Charles Foster says of Changing Places: “He’s got a nerve, has Carl Tomlinson. Most poets dance around loss, desolation, and the presence of the past. He doesn’t. You’re straight in there with a jolt and a bucket of ice-water over your head. But he’ll wake you up, and that’s terribly rare and precious.”
HELEN MORT ~ is a poet and novelist. She is a five-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets award, received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors in 2007, and won the Manchester Poetry Prize Young Writer Prize in 2008. In 2010, she became the youngest ever poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere. In 2014, she won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for “Division Street”, and it was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In a national survey, it was chosen by sixth-form groups and reading groups as their first choice collection. In 2014 she was named as a Next Generation poet by the Poetry Book Society. Her debut novel – Black Car Burning was published in 2020 – described by The Guardian as ” A love letter to Sheffield and the landscape that surrounds it”
ALAN BUCKLEY ~ was brought up on Merseyside, and now lives in Oxford. He has had two pamphlets published, Shiver (2009), which was a Poetry Book Society choice, and The Long Haul (2016). His first full collection, Touched, was published in 2020 by HappenStance Press; it was described by the Daily Telegraph as “one of 2020’s most memorable debuts”. His work has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, and has been highly commended in the Forward and Bridport prizes. He was on the editorial board of ignition press (based at the Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre) from its inception in 2016 until 2019, and worked for eight years as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story. He is a psychotherapist, and specialises in trauma work with refugees.
CHARLES FOSTER ~ is a writer and a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. Recent books include Being a Beast (an attempt, which he describes as a slam-dunk failure), to inhabit the sensory worlds of various non-human species, and The Screaming Sky (in which he follows swifts manically around the world). Being a Beast was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford and Wainwright Prizes, and won the IgNobel Prize for Biology (for work ‘which makes you laugh and then makes you think). Forthcoming books include Being a Human: Adventures in Forty Thousand Years of Consciousness, which takes him from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Enlightenment, and The Siege, a book of short stories illustrating the challenges of living in a world also occupied by humans. He says of himself: ‘Most of my books, in some way or other, are presumptuous and more or less unsuccessful attempts to work out what we are doing in this extraordinary, wonderful, and vertiginous place.’
The event will be hosted by Nadia Kingsley from FAIR ACRE PRESS.
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