Ambit poetry

Open Mic Event

Join us for a night of excellence with readings from Ambit poets GEORGE SZIRTES, DONALD GARDNER, VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN and LIZ BERRY.

Plus: readers from the floor... (turn up early to sign up for a spot - one page max!)

George Szirtes became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and has since won many awards for his work. He lives in Norfolk where he teaches Creative Writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia. His latest book of poetry is The Burning of the Books and other poems (2009). His Selected Poems 1976–1996 appeared in 1996, and his New and Collected Poems in 2008. His poetry collection Reel (2004), was awarded the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Liz Berry was born in 1980 in the Black Country. She works as an infant school teacher in London and is studying part-time for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. Her poems have appeared in magazines including The North, Smiths Knoll, Mslexia and Poetry Wales and her pamphlet The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls is appearing imminently from tall-lighthouse.

Vidyan Ravinthiran is a graduate student and lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford. His pamphlet, At Home or Nowhere, was published last year by tall-lighthouse; other poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Review, The North, the Times Literary Supplement and Ambit and are forthcoming in Stand, Horizon Review, Poetry Wales and an anthology of American and Oxford poets to be published by Waywiser Press.

Donald Gardner was born in Britain but has lived in Holland since 1979. His debut as a performance poet was in the 1960s in New York where he lived for three years, taking part, for instance, in the legendary 1967 reading at the East Village Theater. He is a translator of poetry, notably of work by Octavio Paz and Ernesto Cardenal. His first two books of poetry, Peace Feelers and For the Flames, were published in London. In Holland he has published three chapbooks under his own imprint, Forget-me-not Press.

Time: 7:30pm