Bloodaxe Poets at Newcastle Poetry Festival 2024
This year's Newcastle Poetry Festival in May featured brilliant readings from several Bloodaxe poets. Recordings of Fleur Adcock, Jane Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, Carolyn Forché, Abigail Parry and Patricia Smith are now available to watch on our YouTube and Vimeo channels.
Jane Clarke and Abigail Parry read together at a special event celebrating both of their T S Eliot Prize shortlisted collections. Jane Clarke's third collection A Change in the Air was published in May 2023 and Abigail Parry's second collection I Think We're Alone Now was published in November 2023.
Fleur Adcock launched her Collected Poems, published in February of this year, with a reading alongside Liz Berry. Collected Poems is the first complete edition of Fleur Adcock's poetry and was published on her 90th birthday. She is one of Britain's most accomplished poets and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2006.
Imtiaz Dharker read poems from her new collection Shadow Reader, published in May 2024, alongside former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. American poet Patricia Smith made a surprise return visit to Newcastle to read alongside Suji Kwock Kim and fellow Bloodaxe poet Carolyn Forché. Patricia previously read at the 2017 Newcastle Poetry Festival and at Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts in 2019, where she read poems from Incendiary Art, published in the UK by Bloodaxe Books in 2019. At this year's festival, Patricia read a selection of poems from previous collections and Carolyn mostly read poems from In the Lateness of the World, published in March 2020, plus some new work.
Other Bloodaxe poets also appeared on panels as part of the Northern Poetry Symposium and other events at the festival. Imtiaz Dharker introduced a Global Reading event as part of the Northern Poetry Symposium, featuring readings from Amelia Loulli, Rolf Hermann and CAConrad. Carolyn Forché hosted a Northern Poetry Symposium panel discussion on ‘Poetry of Witness and Refuge’ and was joined by fellow Bloodaxe poet Marjorie Lotfi, as well as Charlotte Shevchenko Knight and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Marjorie Lotfi’s debut poetry collection The Wrong Person to Ask was a joint winner of the inaugural James Berry Poetry Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. It is on the shortlist for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2024.
Diana Anphimiadi read via Zoom at a Women Poets in Translation event, joined by her translators, the leading Georgian translator Natalia Bukia-Peters and award-winning British poet Jean Sprackland, as well as poet and translator Helen Mort. Diana Anphimiadi’s Why I No Longer Write Poems, the first full-length Georgian-English selection of her poetry, was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2022 and was longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
John Challis hosted ‘A Walk to Morden Tower’, a series of performances by Newcastle University students inspired by the iconic Newcastle literary landmark. John Challis’ debut collection The Resurrectionists was published by Bloodaxe in 2021.
[04 April 2024]
