Carcanet’s Summer Festival Calendar – the Highlights

Gillian Clarke

Kicking off the summer festival season, Gillian Clarke will grace the Hay on Earth Stage at Hay Festival (31 May – 10 June) in a special preview session on the 8th June. The National Poet of Wales will be discussing her forthcoming collection, Ice, which will be published in October. In Ice, Gillian Clarke turns to the winters of 2009 and 2010 which, in their extremity, redefined all the seasons for her. Gillian Clarke follows in the rich, millennium-old Welsh tradition of occasional writing, inspired by the drama of a shifting and unpredictable climate.

Patrick McGuinness, author of Jilted City and The Canals of Mars, will also be at Hay to discuss totalitarianism, freedom of speech and literary inventions with poet and novelist Duncan Bush, as well as his critically acclaimed new novel The Last Hundred Days.

Collected Poems 
by Hope Mirrlees

Sandeep Parmar will be dropping into Ledbury Poetry Festival (29 June – 8 July) for ‘20 minutes with....’ to discuss, among her many achievements, her fantastic new edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees, the first edition to gather the full span of Mirrlees’s poetry. Sandeep Parmar was the first scholar to gain access to the Mirrlees Archive at Newnham College, Cambridge, and her edition includes many previously unpublished poems discovered there in draft form.

Carcanet poet Sophie Hannah, whose 2008 collection Pessimism for Beginners was shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize, returns to Ledbury with some poems in progress and a new Selected Poems on the horizon.

The toast of this year’s Ledbury Festival will be Carcanet’s Bill Manhire, Ledbury Festival’s poet-in-residence for 2012. 
The New Zealand Poet Laureate and four-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry will be conducting a series of workshops and readings over the course of the festival. His festival residence will culminate in a fantastic event, the ‘World Laureates Reading’, featuring Kay Ryan, the multi-award winning former US Laureate whose latest collection Odd Blocks, was published by Carcanet in August 2011.

Odd Blocks 
by Kay Ryan

Over in Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, the T.S. Eliot Festival (7 - 8 July) will play host to Sandeep Parmar, who is due to give the annual T.S. Eliot Society lecture, ‘Unreal cities & timeless landscapes: Eliot’s poetic debt to Hope Mirrlees's Paris’, drawing from her new book. Dr Parmar blogged about her experience of the Mirrlees archives: click here to find out about her experiences.

Later in the programme, Bernard O’Donoghue, editor of Carcanet’s OxfordPoets anthologies, will read and discuss Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ in honour of the festival’s literary home, with poets Paul Muldoon, Daljit Nagra.

W.B. Yeats

Living poets may be a popular choice for festival bookers this year, but our FyfieldBooks authors have not been overlooked. In a remarkable celebration of poetry, community and love, the London 2012 Festival has commissioned Peace Camp (19 – 22 July), a coastal installation encircling the UK in eight remote locations and exploring the poignancy of timeless love poets such as W.B. Yeats, John Donne, Matthew Arnold, E.B. Browning, Edward Lear and William Shakespeare.

Overall, an incredibly exciting series of events for your diaries! Keep your eyes peeled for readings and talks by more Carcanet poets at the Edinburgh Book Festival - including events with Gabriel Josipovici, Fiona Sampson, and the launch of Bevel, the long-awaited debut by William Letford - and many more literary celebrations coming up this summer.


Hannah Hiett