Poetry on the Rise: Readings from Nick Laird and Camille Ralphs

We're so please to be hosting Nick Laird and Camille Ralphs for our third poetry reading in our Poetry on the Rise series on July 18th, 7PM.

Join us to hear readings from these renowned contemporary poets' newest collections, followed by a Q&A conversation with Matthew Hollis, poet, critic, editor, and author of the Wasteland: A Biography of a Poem.

Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. A poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic and former lawyer, his awards include the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. Feel Free (2018) was short listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Derek Walcott award. 'Up Late' the title poem for his latest collection Up Late (2023) won the forward prize for best poem. He is the Seamus Heaney Proffesor of Poetry at Queens' University, Belfast.

Nick Laird’s powerful new collection, Up Late, reflects on the strange and chaotic times we live in. Reeling in the face of collapsing systems and the banalities and distortions of modern life, the poet confronts age-old anxieties, questions of aloneness, friendship, illness and death, the push and pull of daily existence.

Laird is a poet capable of heading off in any and every direction, where layers of association transport us from a harbour in County Cork to the library steps in New York’s Washington Square, from a face-off between Freud and Michelangelo’s Moses to one between the poet and a squirrel in a Kilburn garden. And at the heart of the collection lies the title sequence ‘Up Late’, a profound meditation on a father’s dying, and winner of the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

‘Up Late, passionate and angry as Hamlet, is formally brilliant, an exercise in control.’ Martina Evans, Irish Times

Camille Ralphs is a poet and critic, and an editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including the New York Review of Books, Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She comes to us in 2024 with her debut collection After You Were, I Am

In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections – ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee – obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs’s style is utterly distinctive; she is a modern metaphysical, tapping into a haunting, era-spanning utterance enlivened by the electric pulse of wordplay and imaginative conceit. This is poetry that in comprehending the past manages to make of it something utterly original and contemporary.

Host or Publisher Books on the Rise