Join us for an evening of poetry that will transport you to places near and far, on an imaginative journey into landscape, memory, folklore, and history, in which the familiar and the unfamiliar, the present and the past, meet and intermingle. Three poets – Julie Irigaray, Gregory Leadbetter and Derek Littlewood – explore the ways in which our inner and outer worlds speak to each other in and through our encounter with those places that we haunt and are haunted by.
Julie Irigaray is a French Basque writer based in Birmingham. Her poetry pamphlet Whalers, Witches and Gauchos was published by Nine Pens (2021) and her poetry has been featured on BBC Radio 4. Her poems, articles and translations have appeared in over sixty publications across the world (US, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Singapore and South Korea), and her poems have won or been finalists in twenty poetry competitions, including The Bridport Poetry Prize 2024. She is a Sylvia Plath scholar and works as a creative writing tutor at City Lit.
Gregory Leadbetter’s books and pamphlets of poetry include Caliban (Dare-Gale Press, 2023), a New Statesman Book of the Year 2023; Balanuve, with photographs by Phil Thomson (Broken Sleep, 2021); Maskwork (Nine Arches Press, 2020), longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021; The Fetch (Nine Arches Press, 2016), and The Body in the Well (HappenStance Press, 2007). Recent work for the BBC includes the extended poem Metal City (Radio 3, 2023). A song-cycle featuring poems from The Fetch by the composer and pianist Eric McElroy has been performed internationally, and a recording with the tenor James Gilchrist was released in 2023. As a critic he publishes widely on the history and practice of poetry, and his book Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination was awarded the University English Book Prize 2012. He is Professor of Poetry at Birmingham City University. His next book of poetry, The Infernal Garden, will be published by Nine Arches Press in August 2025.
Derek Littlewood taught literature and latterly creative writing at Birmingham City University for over 30 years. He lives in Worcestershire with his family. He has poems in a number of anthologies including Invisible Zoos: Poems with a life of their own, ed. Sharon Larkin and Simon Williams (Eithon Bridge 2019). Derek has read his work at 1000 Trades, Birmingham School of Art and Avoncroft, and been longlisted in the National Poetry Competition. He is now writing uncanny short stories, some appearing in Other Worlds: an Anthology (2020). He is a keen birder and photographer, mostly at his local patch Upton Warren, where he volunteers. He is grateful to Worcestershire Stanza and Zellig poetry groups.
Image courtesy of Rob Perry: Sunburst Wyre Forest (detail)