Matt Howard events
‘Matt Howard knows his subjects intimately, and has a gift for illuminating the most fragile and precarious among them, such as the fen raft spider and the ‘niche and otherness’ of its mating rituals. All human life is part of the same fabric, and these poems shine with insight into our loves and griefs, our capacity for cruelty and joy. In spite of everything, that sense of true belonging in the world is felt “in every part of me, singing”.’ – Jean Sprackland
Matt Howard’s second collection Broadlands is published in June 2024. It follows his debut Gall (2018) from The Rialto, which won the inaugural Laurel Prize for Best First Collection and the 2018 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry and was also shortlisted for the 2019 Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Prize. The poems in Broadlands are grounded in the reedbeds, meadows and marshes of the Norfolk Broads. They are closely and thrillingly observed from real encounters, inviting us closer to the more-than-human world, its violence, fragility and wonder. Yet the human is always and all the more present; here too are poems of desire, love and grief.
Matt Howard was born in Norfolk in 1978. He is a poet and environmentalist who worked in various roles for the RSPB for more than a decade. He has been poet in residence for the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and also the Wordsworth Trust. Since 2018 he has been a trustee of The Rialto, and was Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds 2021-2023.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Wednesday 8 May, 7pm
Leeds launch event for Broadlands
Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds
Matt Howard will be launching his new collection Broadlands at this event hosted by the University of Leeds Poetry Centre.
Admission free - more details coming soon.
[23 April 2024]
