14 February

Poetry @ the Print Room

Readings from Emily Berry, Nicola Nathan, Martha Sprackland and Richard Scott.

Emily Berry‘s debut book of poems, Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Hawthornden Prize. Stranger, Baby, its eagerly awaited follow-up, is published in February 2017.  Born in London 1981 and, other than time at university in Leeds, has lived in London all her life, describing herself as ‘quite a diehard Londoner’. She studied Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and in 2008 received an Eric Gregory Award. In the same year, her pamphlet Stingray Fevers was published by Tall-Lighthouse. She was announced as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation Poets’ in 2014, and was appointed Editor of the Poetry Society in 2017.

‘Emily Berry’s debut is a treat’ Kate Kellaway, The Guardian. 

 

Nicola Nathan grew up in Wales and now lives in the Chilterns. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Edinburgh Review, Poetry London and Ambit. Her pamphlet “Tiny” was published in September 2016. She is working towards her first collection.

‘Really beautiful strong writing, not a word wasted. . . . addressing serious emotional questions in their eerily brilliant mythical guide’ Ruth Padel on Tiny by Nicola Nathan

 

Martha Sprackland is a writer and editor. Her debut pamphlet, Glass As Broken Glass, is published January 2017 with Rack Press. Twice a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, she was also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her work has appeared in Poetry Review, LRB, Five Dials, New Humanist, Magma, Poetry London and she has read at a number of festivals, including Port Eliot, The Good Life Experience, Caught by the River Thames, and Curious Arts Festival. In 2015 she participated in the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry festival in Sofia and Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria. Martha is poet-in-residence for Caught by the River. She is co-Founder and poetry editor of Cake magazine, was assistant poetry editor for Faber & Faber, and is one of the founding editors of new bilingual magazine La Errante. 

“[With] formal acuity Martha Sprackland’s Domestic characterizes a broken relationship as helplessly frozen syntax teetering on that very word – as – everything that’s just happened in a nameless quarrel ‘as’ something faraway, free of it, clear of it, like smoke or sky. Numbness of spent emotion, wonderfully anatomized: ‘Glass as broken glass.”‘ – Glyn Maxwell

 

Richard Scott was born in London in 1981. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Poetry of Sex (Penguin) and Butt Magazine. His pamphlet Wound, published by Rialto, won the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2016. 

‘Gothic and grisly . . . Scott takes an unflinching look at the knotty roots of sexual desire from a strikingly original perspective’. The TLS.