Poetry Book Society Autumn Launch

The Department of English and Related Literature is delighted to host the Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Launch as part of our Writers at York series. Each quarter, the Poetry Book Society chooses a list of recommended books for its members and readers of poetry more generally. This event will feature readings by three of the Autumn 2018 recommended poets: Kate Potts, Kit Fan, and Zaffar Kunial.

Kate Potts’ debut pamphlet Whichever Music (tall-lighthouse, 2008) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and was shortlisted for a Michael Marks Award. Her first full-length collection was Pure Hustle (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). Kate teaches poetry and creative writing for the University of Oxford, Middlesex University and The Poetry School, freelances as a mentor and editor, and works part-time for an independent publisher. She has been awarded two Arts Council England grants and a Hawthornden Fellowship. Her second collection Feral sets out to explore and trouble the boundary between “animal” and “human”.

Kit Fan was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK aged 21. He studied at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before completing a doctoral thesis on Thom Gunn at the University of York. As well as being a published poet, he also writes fiction. In 2017 he was shortlisted for The Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize for Duty Free and the TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prize. In 2018 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for Diamond Hill, a novel-in-progress portraying a deprived community in the last shanty town in Hong Kong during the 1980s. Kit’s first book of poems Paper Scissors Stone won the inaugural HKU International Poetry Prize in 2011 and his translation of Classical Chinese poetry won one of The Times Stephen Spender Prizes in 2006. He reviews regularly for The Poetry Review. As his poetry moves between Hong Kong and European cultural histories, he also moves between poetry and narrative fiction. He lives in York and works in the Hull York Medical School.

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of ‘Hill Speak‘ at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem ‘The Word’.

This event is part of the Writers at York series, which offers a lively programme of public readings and workshops, and aims to celebrate and explore the work of emerging and established contemporary writers.

Admission: All welcome, no booking required