Book Launch: The Matter by Padraig Regan

Doors at 5:30pmStart time at 6pm

We celebrate Padraig Regan's new collection, in coversation with Susannah Dickey.

Following on from their decorated debut, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023, Padraig Regan’s The Matter deepens the ekphrastic concerns of their previous work, directing their gaze towards naturally occurring objects.

Divided into three parts of lyrical abundance – Animal, Mineral and Vegetable – the parts are linked by their attempts to imaginatively encounter the non-human (and at times, the inorganic) in ways that pay attention to the different formal or material possibilities of embodiment, and offer new foils for this remarkable poet’s intense reflections on mortality and desire.

Padraig Regan's debut collection Some Integrity was published by Carcanet in 2022 and received the Clarissa Luard Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They were a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge from 2022 to 2024.