Carcanet at the Edinburgh Book Festival 2014

Last weekend, our lovely Marketing and Publicity Manager, Alice Mullen, took a trip up to bonny Scotland to visit the Edinburgh International Book Festival where Carcanet poet Rowan Williams was launching his highly-anticipated second collection The Other Mountain (proudly modeled by Alice on the right there). 

The audience at Rowan Williams' Edinburgh reading

Another Carcanet poet appearing at the festival this weekend is Scottish-born roofer Billy Letford, who

startled a few passengers on an Edinburgh tram when he performed his poem 'There's hunners o burds on the roofs' for BBC Arts. The recording was broadcast on Sunday 10th August but you can watch it again here. The poem was published in Billy's debut collection Bevel.

And here's another delightfully entertaining video of Billy performing a selection of his poems at the live Unbound sessions at Edinburgh!

If you happen to be hanging around the festival this weekend, go and see Billy tomorrow night at Voices in the Dark; an evening of live spoken word performances in a darkened theatre space. Also featuring readings from Rhian Edwards, Joshua Idehen and Rachel McCrum. 

Tonight, director of the Scottish Poetry Library Robyn Marsack leads a panel celebrating the work of Mikhail Lermontov, one of Russia's greatest poets who also descended from Scottish ancestry. The event also marks the publication of After Lermontov: Translations for the Bicentenary (Carcanet, 2014) a book which offers a Scottish perspective on the poet. You can still buy tickets for that here.

Dr. Marsack was interviewed about Lermontov and the new translations on Voice of Russia UK radio, and you can listen to a clip here (although the person talking is Alexander Hutchinson who's translated Lermontov's Borodino into Scots).  

On Monday, Jamaican poet Kei Miller (shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize and longlisted for the 2014 Dylan Thomas Prize) teams up with Edinburgh-based poet Tom Pow to consider the ways in which we imagine false paradises and actually carve out better lives for ourselves. Book your tickets here.

Kei will be reading from his latest collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion.

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The Carcanet Blog Sale

With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.

For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Rowan Williams' The Other Mountain and William Letford's Bevel.

All books come with 10% off and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk, so to claim your extra discount, use the code BLOG (case-sensitive). Happy reading!