Ruth Fainlight Film Screening
Poet Ruth Fainlight was born in New York City in 1931. She was educated in the United States and England, and has lived in England since the age of 15, mostly in London. She lived in Spain for four years in her 20s, and has spent long periods in France and Morocco. Her first poetry collection, Cages, was published in 1966. She was Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1985 and 1990.
Her retrospective New & Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2010) covers work written over 50 years, drawing on over a dozen books as well as a whole new collection and a selection of her translations of Sophia Mello de Breyner and Victor Manuel Mendiola. Four of those collections were originally published by Bloodaxe, including Sugar-Paper Blue (1997), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. Other collections were published by Macmillan, Hutchinson and Sinclair-Stevenson. Her most recent collection is Somewhere Else Entirely (Bloodaxe Books, 2018). She has received the Hawthorden Award and the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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Photographer and filmmaker Emily Andersen's film portrait of Ruth Fainlight is a reworking of the three-screen installation that was on show at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham in 2023. The 50-minute single screen film had its premiere at the Coronet Theatre in London on 25 September 2025. Their trailer is below. The film was also screened at Ledbury Poetry Festival in July 2026, and at two international festivals.
Capturing glimpses of Ruth at her home in London, on her walks, and visiting Brighton, the film is a rare insight into the distinguished poet’s extraordinary life and career. Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction are rich with themes of time, memory, and loss. In the film, she movingly recites her work 'Somewhere Else Entirely', the title poem of her 2018 Bloodaxe collection, composed after the death of her husband Alan Sillitoe.
Written during her 80s, Ruth Fainlight's collection Somewhere Else Entirely also includes several short pieces of prose, and memoirs of her childhood years spent in the USA.
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An in-depth interview with poet Ruth Fainlight featured in the Financial Times of 22 March 2025. Read online here.
Ruth spoke about the collection and read poems from Somewhere Else Entirely on BBC Radio 4's Front Row in November 2018. Click here to listen. Intro & final item, from 19:00.
[18 August 2025]
