Words on Tap Presents John Hegley and Julia Deakin

Contact: m_stoppard@hotmail.com

FREE event featuring performance poetry pioneer John Hegley and the award-winning poet Julia Deakin.

John Hegley was born in Newington Green, North London, and was educated in Luton, Bristol and Bradford University.

His first public performance monies came from busking his songs, initially outside a shoeshop in Hull, in the late Seventies. He performed on the streets of London in the early Eighties, fronting the Popticians, with whom he also recorded two sessions for John Peel, and has since been a frequent performer of his words, sung and spoken, on both local and national radio.

He has produced ten books of verse and prose pieces, two CDs and one mug, but his largest source of income is from stages on his native island. An Edinburgh Festival regular, he is noted for his exploration of such diverse topics as dog hair, potatoes, handkerchieves and the misery of human existence.

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Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton, lives in Huddersfield and works in Bradford. She has read on Poetry Please and won seven first prizes, including four in 2011 and this year's Lightship International. Her first collection, Without a Dog - praised by poets as diverse as Anne Stevenson and Simon Armitage - is followed now by Eleven Wonders.

'Julia Deakin's Eleven Wonders is powerful, assured, elegant,' says Michael Symmons Roberts. 'Her formal skill and inventiveness make this a rich and eclectic collection. Those who, like me, have admired her individual poems in the past, will be struck by their cumulative strength and range, and this book deserves to win her many new readers.'

Entry: FREE

Time: 7:00pm