Free event at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on Saturday 25 January 2020 at 2.30-4.00. Everyone welcome. All areas of the Gallery are accessible and there are several parking bays on Denmark Road for disabled visitors.

Jo Shapcott

Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.

Kim Moore

Kim Moore’s first collection The Art of Falling (Seren, 2015) won the 2016 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She won a Northern Writers Award in 2014, an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010.  Her pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition.  She is currently a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University and is working on her second collection.  Along with Clare Shaw, she is Co-Director of Kendal Poetry Festival.

Jennifer Lee Tsai 

Photo credit: Suzanne Lau

Jennifer Lee Tsai is a poet, editor and critic. She was born in Bebington and grew up in Liverpool. Jennifer is a fellow of The Complete Works III and a Ledbury Poetry Critic. Her poems are featured in the anthologies Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe: 2017), Islands Are But Mountains: New Poetry from the UK (Platypus Press, 2019) and have been published in various magazines and journals including Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, SMOKE, Soundings, Ambit, Wild Court and Magma.

Jennifer is an Associate Editor of SMOKE magazine and a Contributing Editor to Ambit. She is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool.

Her debut poetry pamphlet Kismet (2019) is published by ignitionpress.

Chris Davies

Chris is a Musician, Composer, Performer, Buddhist, Hairdresser and Oudist with over thirty years experience working in the Arts, mainly with visual theatre and dance. His current projects are composing music and performing in a new adaptation of the 12th century Sufi poem ‘The Conference of Birds’ by Farid ud-Din Attar; he continues to perform live accompaniment for the first full length animated film ever made ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, with a play called ‘Spring Reign’ about the situation in Aleppo, Syria; he is saxophonist/raver with Mr Wilson’s Second Liners who play early 90’s dance classics in the style of a New Orleans Brass Band, a few haircuts, transforming the mind through Buddhist study and practice, and sound technician for Poets and Players. For more information please look here ~ http://www.musichris.co.uk