Creatures of the Mind: exploring human and non-human consciousness with Jen Hadfield, Tania Hershman and Joe Carrick-Varty
Saturday 27th May
Theatre Deli, Arley St, S2 4QP
16:00 – 17:30
£3 – £12
[Captioned & Wheelchair Accessible]
Event Description
This event brings together three poets who have all written about consciousness in different ways. From an octopus taking over your heart, to memories locked in ancient rock, to the surprising ways that trauma is refracted through the brain, our speakers bring the unusual and the sublime into sharp focus and find new ways of looking at life and thought.
Featuring readings and a panel discussion.
Content warning: Event may contain themes of suicide and domestic violence.
About the Poets
Jen Hadfield is an award-winning poet, creative writing tutor and artist, with special interests in ecopoetics and neurodiversity. In 2008, she was the winner of the T.S.Eliot Poetry Prize. Her fourth poetry collection, The Stone Age, won the 2021 Highland Book Prize. She is currently editing her first work of lyrical non-fiction, Storm Pegs, for Picador. She lives in Shetland.
Tania Hershman’s second poetry collection, Still Life With Octopus, was published by Nine Arches Press in July 2022 and her debut novel, Go On, a fictional-memoir-in-collage”, by Broken Sleep Books in Nov 2022. She is also the author of a poetry collection, two poetry pamphlets and three short story collections, editor of FUEL: An Anthology of Prize-Winning Flash Fictions Raising Funds to Fight Fuel Poverty, and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014) and On This Day She book (John Blake, 2021). She has a PhD in creative writing inspired by particle physics. www.taniahershman.com
Joe Carrick-Varty is a British-Irish poet, writer and founding editor of bath magg. His work has appeared in New Statesman, Granta, POETRY, The Poetry Review, The Forward Book of Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review and Poetry London. He is the author of More Sky (Carcanet Press, 2023), 54 Questions for the Man Who Sold a Shotgun to My Father (Out-Spoken Press, 2020) and Somewhere Far (The Poetry Business, 2019). In 2018 he won the New Poets Prize and in 2022 he won an Eric Gregory Award. Joe is currently the 2023 Anthony Burgess Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.
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