T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry: Annual Reading

The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Durham University, in association with the Poetry Book Society, London, presents the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Annual Reading, with Sean Borodale and Jacob Polley.

Jacob Polley is the author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) and, most recently, The Havocs (2012), as well as a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novel, Talk of the Town. Born in Cumbria, he lives in Scotland where he teaches at the University of St Andrews. Polley has always been a poet of unease and the makeshift; where the structure of family and the domestic acts as a framework for his untamed, disruptive dreaming and loving self, and for whom rhyme is both security and seducer. The Havoc finds Polley writing with energy and maturity, maintaining his humility as well as his panache as he unsettles an unsettling universe.

Sean Borodale is a poet and artist, making descriptive and documentary poems written on location, including Notes for an Atlas (2003), a 370-page topographical work written whilst walking around London, and Walking to Paradise (1999), written whilst walking in the footsteps of Wordsworth and Coleridge around the Lake District. Bee Journal (2012) is his first collection of poetry. He was Northern Arts Fellow of the Wordsworth Trust in 1999 and Guest Artist at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2002. From 2002-7 he was a teaching fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL.

Contact stephen.regan@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.

Related Links

• Poetry Book Society