Kim Moore’s debut collection, The Art of Falling, and Andrew Forster’s Homecoming have been selected by arts organisation New Writing North in their list of 10 titles from the north of England for this year’s Read Regional campaign, which from March to June will see authors taking part in book group-sized events at libraries and literary festivals across the north.

Kim Moore, who lives in Barrow, and works part-time as a brass teacher for Cumbria Music Service s well as playing trumpet in a nine-piece soul band, said of her book: “Psychologists tell us that we are born with only two fears: the fear of falling and the fear of noises. The idea of falling and what it means to fall has always fascinated me. There are so many different ways we can fall as human beings – physically, emotionally, morally, spiritually, psychologically – and many of my poems explore this idea. I didn’t set out to do this, but it was one of the threads that emerged when I started to group the poems together.”

 Andrew Forster has published two full collections of poetry. From 2008 until 2015 he was Literature Officer with the Wordsworth Trust, and is co-editor of the online poetry magazine The Compass. He said: “In 2008 I moved to Cumbria to take up a job with the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, after 21 years of living and working in Scotland. I was born in South Yorkshire and I’d never lived in Cumbria before so the ‘homecoming’ of the title isn’t a traditional one. The ‘home’ it refers to is the North of England, but the book explores the different notions of what a ‘home’ can actually be.”