Free event at the Whitworth Art Gallery. All welcome.

Jacob Polley

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Jacob Polley was born and grew up in Cumbria. He has published four books of poems with Picador, winning the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry for his fourth, Jackself. He was also awarded the 2013 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, for The Havocs, and the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, Talk of the Town (2009). Jacob has written and performed drama for the radio, as well as made films and various collaborative public art and performance pieces. Jacob is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and lives with his family on the North East coast.

Jackself was described by the judges of the T.S. Eliot Prize as ‘a firework of a book; inventive, exciting and outstanding in its imaginative range and depth of feeling.’ A poet of the uncanny and the startlingly lyrical, Jacob Polley’s work explores his rural upbringing, the forces of tradition and history, and the power of speech as it approaches song.

Phoebe Power

Phoebe Power’s debut poetry collection, Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet, 2018), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, Winner of the 2018 Forward (Felix Dennis) Prize for Best First Collection and shortlisted for the 2018 T.S. Eliot Prize. She has collaborated with other artists on projects including a live performance of her pamphlet Harp Duet (Eyewear, 2016), and Christl, a video installation involving poetry, visual art and sound. Phoebe received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2014 and an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012.

Amy McCauley

Amy McCauley is a poet, editor, performer and workshop facilitator. She is an Editor at MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture and her dramatic work Oedipa was published by Guillemot Press in 2018.

Rachael Gladwin

Rachael Gladwin is a singer-songwriter and contemporary harpist. Her upbeat folky songs deliver melodic stories about people, places and journeys. Rachael also works in jazz, music for street theatre and indoor theatre, large scale performance projects, creative session playing and performing nationwide with various bands. She has played and recorded with dozens of artists including Guy Garvey, Corinne Bailey Rae, DJ Shadow, Jimmy Osmond and  Susan Boyle. Internationally, Rachael is the harpist for the dazzling French street theatre company La Machine where she performs on a moving cherry picker 40 feet in the air next to giant roaming mechanical animals.

For Poets and Players Rachael will be performing songs from her 2018 album, Somewhere by the Moon.