Nick Drake events
Nick Drake's first book-length collection, The Man in the White Suit (Bloodaxe Books, 1999), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1999, and was selected for the Next Generation Poets promotion in 2004. His second collection, From The Word Go, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2007. In September 2010 he was invited to join Cape Farewell's trip to the Arctic to explore climate change, and from that journey arose a commission from United Visual Artists to create poems and texts for their ground-breaking installation High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum (2011). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his book-length sequence of poems The Farewell Glacier (2012), which Nick Drake adapted for performance at COP26 and then for BBC Radio 3. His fourth collection, Out of Range, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018.
Nick Drake is also a screenwriter, and co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film One Life, starring Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham Carter, which opened in UK cinemas on 1 January 2024. The trailer can be seen here.
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Poet and librettist Nick Drake was commissioned with the award-winning composer Rachel Portman to create a 'song' for the 2025 BBC Proms. The Gathering Tree received its world premiere on Saturday 13 September 2025 at the Last Night of the Proms. The BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were conducted by Elim Chan. Nick Drake and Rachel Portman have previously collaborated on Earth Song (2019) and Tipping Points, which had its UK premiere at the Brighton Festival with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2025. Scroll down for details and a link to the BBC broadcast from the Last Night of the Proms.
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PAST EVENTS AND RECORDINGS
The Last Night of the Proms, 2025: The Gathering Tree
Poet and librettist Nick Drake was commissioned with the award-winning composer Rachel Portman to create a 'song' for the BBC Proms. The Gathering Tree received its world premiere on Saturday 13 September 2025 at the Last Night of the Proms. The BBC Singers and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were conducted by Elim Chan.
The BBC Proms commission was for Nick Drake to write something about 'who we are now' as a nation. Below is the chorus to The Gathering Tree, the poem which Nick Drake wrote for Rachel Portman to set to music.
We are the source, the stream and the river,
We are the stories we sing to the sea
We are the stories of loss, the stories of love,
Together we sing the gathering tree
The live television broadcasts were divided between two channels: BBC Two (first half), then BBC One (The Finale), and both are available on BBC iPlayer for 11 months. The Gathering Tree was performed in the second half of the programme.
BBC One (Finale). Available on BBC iPlayer for 11 months after broadcast. The Gathering Tree is introduced at 43:50. Nick Drake and Rachel Portman were invited to stand after the performance to receive applause from a very appreciative audience.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002jm3q/bbc-proms-2025-last-night-of-the-proms-finale
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Nick Drake’s fourth collection Out of Range, published by Bloodaxe on 15 November 2018, explores some of the most pressing issues of the early 21st century. Here are elegies for the Whitechapel Fatberg and incandescent lightbulbs; the life stories of plastic bottles and ice-core samples; portraits of those living on the margins of the city streets, and of Voyager 1 crossing the threshold of the solar system. The past echoes in poems about the ancient artists who recorded their presence in cave art, a Spanish missionary thrilled by an Aztec ball game, and a story of gay love from the Song dynasty. The poems in Out of Range expand on environmental concerns raised in his last collection The Farewell Glacier, Nick Drake’s book-length sequence of poems set in the High Arctic, which was inspired by his voyage around Svalbard.
Click here to read Nick Drake's blog on Climate Cultures. He dicusses three poems from his fourth collection Out of Range.
To read the full Book of the Week review at Oxford Poetry Library, click here (scroll down to 17-22 November 2018)
Nick Drake's poem 'Out of Range' was Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre's Poem of the Week for 25 November 2018. Click here to read.
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In February 2021 Nick Drake was interviewed for this article on the international platform Artists & Climate Change about The Farewell Glacier,
‘The Farewell Glacier is a chronological account of the Western, and especially European, experience in the Arctic told through the voices of the humans who encountered it, the chemical elements that have polluted it… and other non-human actors, such as a sea-shanty, the sun, pteropods, and an ice-core sample. He [Nick Drake] calls it “a story about wonder and consumption,” of “exploration and exploitation.”’ – Susan Hoffman Fishman, Artists & Climate Change
Read the article in full here.
Nick Drake reads 'The Farewell Glacier' from the Arctic
This video by Matt Wainwright was shot during the Cape Farewell 2010 Arctic Expedition, and shows Nick Drake aboard ship reading one of the poems he wrote during the voyage. Five marine scientists and ten artists from around the world – writers, musicians, visual artists, directors and architects – sailed from Longyearbyen around the north-east coast of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic to encounter the magnificence of this extreme and threatened environment and engage with the scientific research being conducted on board.
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Nick Drake contributed to BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature Freeze: Thaw on 20 December 2015. He read and spoke about two poems from The Farewell Glacier, a book he wrote in response to his trip to the High Arctic in September 2010 with Cape Farewell, an organisation devoted to cultural responses to climate change.
The first poem, ‘When I was twelve’, is in the voice of British Polar explorer Wally Herbert (from 24.43) and the second, ‘This is the library of ice’, is the story of an ice core sample (from 30.25). Those poems, together with others inspired by the Arctic and its voices, are gathered in his 2012 Bloodaxe collection The Farewell Glacier.
Click here to listen to the programme
[23 March 2026]
