Poets in the House

Contact: shantaacharya@btinternet.com, 020 8341 7799

Shanta Acharya, Jane Griffiths, Peter McDonald, and John Whitworth.

Shanta Acharya, born in Orissa, India, won a scholarship to do a DPhil in English at Oxford where she was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College. She was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard before working in investment management in the City of London. She is the author of nine books - five collections of poetry; her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson; and three books on asset management. An internationally published poet, critic, reviewer, her latest poetry collection is Dreams That Spell The Light. She was elected to the board of trustees of the Poetry Society, UK, in 2011.
www.shantaacharya.com

Jane Griffiths has published four collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, of which the most recent is Terrestrial Variations (2012). Another Country: New & Selected Poems was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2008. After reading English at Oxford, where her poem 'The House' won the Newdigate Prize, she worked as a bookbinder and lexicographer before returning to Oxford for doctoral work on the Tudor poet John Skelton. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1996. She has lectured at Edinburgh University and Bristol University, and is now a Tutorial Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford.

Peter McDonald was born in Belfast, and educated at Methodist College, Belfast, and University College, Oxford. After winning the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award, he published his first book of poems in 1989. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. His critical and editorial work includes Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997), Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002), The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007), and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012). He is the editor of W.B. Yeats' Complete Poems (Longman). Peter divides his time between Northern Ireland and England, where he works as a university lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford.

John Whitworth has published ten books of poems and one about how to write them. He studied English at Oxford and taught Creative Writing at the University of Kent. He lives in Canterbury with his wife, Doreen Roberts, and two daughters. His poems are published in magazines worldwide; John appears regularly in Quadrant edited by Les Murray. He has won several prestigious awards and prizes, including the £5,000 Literary Review prize; the £1,000 Peterloo prize (twice); the £1,000 Writers' Workshop prize; and the $1,000 Eleanor Room prize from the University of Lamar, Texas. His latest collection, Girlie Gangs, was published by Enitharmon in 2012.

Poetry in the House is organised and hosted by Shanta Acharya.

Price: £5.00 / £3.00

Time: 8:00pm