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Scottish Poetry Library Podcast

302 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 7 ratings

Podcasts from the Scottish Poetry Library435398 

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Episodes

Episode 301: Nothing But The Poem - Daniel Sluman

July 18, 2022 00:00 - 20 minutes - 17 MB

Scottish Poetry Library's Sam Tongue runs a monthly online meet-up, where Friends of the Poetry Library get together to read and discuss a fresh poet and their poems.  In this podcast, Sam introduces us to Daniel Sluman  Have a look at our website to find out about becoming a Friend, and join us for the next Nothing but the Poem meet-up. Or simply enjoy this podcast and the excellent poems therein. 

Episode 300: Nothing But the Poem - Jay Whittaker

June 23, 2022 00:00 - 11 minutes - 10.2 MB

Scottish Poetry Library's Sam Tongue runs a monthly online meet-up, where Friends of the Poetry Library get together to read and discuss a fresh poet and their poems.  In this podcast, Sam introduces us to the general style and format, and enjoys the work of Jay Whittaker Have a look at our website to find out about becoming a Friend, and join us for the next Nothing but the Poem meet-up. Or simply enjoy this podcast and the excellent poems therein. 

Episode 299: Poetry and Covid-19 (part two)

June 21, 2021 00:00 - 45 minutes - 62.2 MB

Almost a year and a half into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books has published Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It’s edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: ‘The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in...

Episode 298: Poetry and Covid-19 (part one)

March 04, 2021 10:04 - 19 minutes - 60.1 MB

A year into the Covid-19 era, the publisher Shearsman Books is putting out a new title, Poetry and Covid 19 – An Anthology of Contemporary International and Collaborative Poetry. It's edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman, the idea being to pair 19 UK-based poets with poets from around the world to work on poems together. As the blurb puts it: 'The poems herein are as personal as they are communal, and as local as they are international. Between them, the writers reside in all...

Episode 297: Happy 100th Birthday, Muriel Spark! With Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin

December 11, 2020 09:32 - 34 minutes - 47 MB

 Muriel Spark’s 100th birthday was celebrated in 2018 in several ways honouring her status as arguably the greatest Scottish novelist of the twentieth century. One of the more imaginative ways came late in the year with the publication of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark, which was edited by poets Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin and published by Blue Diode. With contributors including Tishani Doshi, Vahni Capildeo and Sean O’Brien, the anthology does ...

Episode 297: Rob A. Mackenzie

December 11, 2020 00:00 - 37 minutes - 51.8 MB

Rob A. Mackenzie's latest collection of poetry, which is published by Salt, is called The Book of Revelation. The first half of the book pairs chapters from the Biblical Book of Revelation with poems inspired by them. Mackenzie was born in Glasgow. He studied law and then switched to theology then spent a year in Seoul, eight years in Lanarkshire, five years in Turin, and now lives in Leith. He is reviews editor of Magma poetry magazine and until the pandemic struck he co-organised...

Louise Peterkin

October 29, 2020 00:00 - 38 minutes - 52.9 MB

Louise Peterkin's debut collection The Night Jar (published by Salt) adds new twists on fairy tales, Bond henchmen, Hitchcock and HP Lovecraft to its devil's brew. Based in Edinburgh, Peterkin discusses how her love of classic horror films inspired poems, how to approach the work of great artists whose personal life and views are troubling, and her recurring character, a nun called Sister Agnieszka.

Adam O. Davis

October 07, 2020 00:00 - 42 minutes - 58.1 MB

Index of Haunted Houses, the debut collection by Adam O. Davis, uses ghosts and hauntings to talk about the perilous economic and social moment the United States finds itself in currently. During this podcast, released in time for Halloween, Davis discusses how we've come to use the language of the uncanny to describe the world we live in today, why hauntings are, counter-intuitively, a great metaphors for the nature of life, and what capitalism has in common with Bruce Willis' c...

Beverley Bie Brahic

September 03, 2020 00:00 - 32 minutes - 45 MB

Beverley Bie Brahic is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Paris, France and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translations include Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. Suzannah V. Evans spoke with her at StAnza 2020, where she discussed how translating poetry inspires her own work, owning a secret shelf of erotic literature, and being a 'selfi...

John Burnside on W.S. Graham

July 30, 2020 00:00 - 41 minutes - 56.8 MB

The SPL is pleased to be able to share a treasure from our audio archives: from 2008, a talk by poet and novelist John Burnside on fellow Scottish poet W.S. Graham. During the talk, recorded at the National Library of Scotland before an audience, Burnside talks about poetry and visual art, the poet as nomad and 'feeding the dead'.

Volya Hapeyeva and Annie Rutherford

July 03, 2020 00:00 - 33 minutes - 46.4 MB

Volha or Volya Hapeyeva is a Belarusian poet and translator.Her new pamphlet In My Garden of Mutants, which will be published by Arc early next year, was translated by Annie Richardson, a translator based in Edinburgh.In the first podcast recorded during the lockdown, Annie talks from Scotland's capital and Volya from Austria about the joys of translation, Britain's lamentable record on learning foreign languages and whether now is the right time to be writing poems about the pandem...

Nancy Campbell

June 12, 2020 00:00 - 26 minutes - 36.7 MB

Nancy Campbell is a writer of poetry, essays and non-fiction. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to the environment, most recently The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019. Campbell’s first poetry collection Disko Bay was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. In 2018...

Christopher Whyte

May 28, 2020 00:00 - 38 minutes - 53.3 MB

Christopher Whyte is a poet and translator whose last collection, Step by Step, which is published by Acair, was runner-up in the 2019 Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Prize. Whyte stopped off at the SPL towards the end of last year accompanied by his translator Petra Poncarova. Since Christopher Whyte’s Gaelic poetry first appeared in the 1980s, he has been an influential and sometimes controversial figure in the world of Gaelic writing. In Whyte’s work, poetry and language are ine...

Ella Frears

April 02, 2020 00:00 - 23 minutes - 32.9 MB

Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in south-east London. She has had poetry published in the LRB, Poetry London, Ambit, The Rialto, Poetry Daily, POEM, and the Moth among others. Her pamphlet Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity was published by Goldsmiths Press 2018. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling is published by Offord Road Books, and came out in April, 2020. Suzanna V Evans spoke with Ella Frears at the StAnza Poetry Festival in 2019. Frears reads her poems and d...

Juana Adcock and Tessa Berring

February 20, 2020 00:00 - 37 minutes - 51.3 MB

This week's podcast features not one but two poets, both published by Blue Diode: Juana Adcock and Tessa Berring. Juana Adcock is a Mexican-born Scotland-based poet and translator who works in both English and Spanish. In her first book Manca, she explored her native country’s violence. Her translations have been published in Asymptote and Words Without Borders, and she has worked on translations for the British Council and Conaculta, Mexico’s council for culture and the arts. Te...

Aileen Ballantyne

January 24, 2020 11:53 - 29 minutes - 40.7 MB

Before becoming a poet, Aileen Ballantyne was a journalist, and it's her former profession that informs her poetry, not least in a sequence of poems in her recently published collection Taking Flight that explore the aftermath of 1988's Lockerbie bombing, still the worst terrorist attack to take place on British soil. Ballantyne also reads poems about the moon landing and childhood flights to the USA.

Alan Spence: Edinburgh Makar

December 20, 2019 12:30 - 29 minutes - 40.9 MB

In June 2019, poet, playwright and novelist Alan Spence performed at the Library to mark his first year as the Makar or Poet Laureate of Edinburgh. We recorded the event and present it to you now. During the performance he talks about some initial misgivings about how to make the post work, how he overcame those doubts, he reads many of the Edinburgh-based commissions he’s worked on during that first year and reads an ode to the former international Scottish rugby player Dodie Weir....

Stewart Conn

December 04, 2019 12:18 - 31 minutes - 43.6 MB

Over a decade has passed since Stewart Conn was Edinburgh's Makar or Poet Laureate, yet the city continues to exert its influence upon him. His latest collection Aspects of Edinburgh maps the city as well as his fascination with its buildings, history and people. Conn was born in 1936, growing up mainly in Kilmarnock, where his father was a minister. He worked at the BBC from 1962, mainly as a radio drama producer, becoming Head of Radio Drama, until he resigned in 1992. Publicatio...

Tolu Agbelusi

October 30, 2019 00:00 - 24 minutes - 33 MB

Tolu Agbelusi is a Nigerian British, poet, playwright, performer, educator and lawyer, with compelling story telling skills. Her work 'addresses the unperformed self, womanhood and the art of living. For our latest podcast Suzannah V. Evans interviewed Agbelusi at Stanza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year. Agbelusi talks about building communities and empowering people through literature; she is the founder of Home Sessions, a development program and community for Black...

Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, Hamish Henderson and The Darg

October 08, 2019 00:00 - 34 minutes - 47.8 MB

To mark the centenary of Hamish Henderson's birth, we're joined by Marcas Mac an Tuairneir, poet and Gaelic language advocate. He talks about Henderson's legacy as a writer and activist. He also discusses the Poets Republic, which has recently published a tribute volume in honour of Henderson, to which Mac an Tuairneir has contributed. He also talks about his own poetry and how he came to write in Gaelic.

Penny Boxall

August 30, 2019 00:00 - 31 minutes - 43 MB

Penny Boxall is the winner of the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and the 2018 Mslexia / Poetry Book Society Poetry Competition. She's the author of two collections, Ship of the Line and Who Goes There?, both published by Valley Press. She was born in 1987 and grew up in Aberdeenshire and Yorkshire. We spoke earlier this year and at the time of the interview she was Development Manager at Shandy Hall, Laurence Sterne’s house in the North York Moors. Jackie Kay, who was one of the jud...

Niall O'Gallagher

July 29, 2019 00:00 - 36 minutes - 50.1 MB

To coincide with Niall O'Gallagher's appointment as Bàrd Baile Ghlaschu, Glasgow's Gaelic poet laureate, we present an interview with O'Gallagher. Niall O’Gallagher’s first book of poems, Beatha Ùr (Clàr), was published in 2013. Beatha Ùr continued Gaelic poetry’s long-running engagement with Scotland’s largest city. His second collection, Suain nan Trì Latha (2016), made this explicit in a series of poems, many addressed to the poet’s infant son, echoing classical Gaelic love lyri...

Mary Jean Chan

June 28, 2019 00:00 - 30 minutes - 24.2 MB

This month Suzannah V Evans takes over as host; she's in conversation with Mary Jean Chan in an interview recorded at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival, earlier this year. Chan was born in 1990 and raised in Hong Kong before continuing her education at the Universities of Oxford and London. She's already been nominated for the Forward Prize for Poetry's Best Single Poem category twice and earlier this year she was given an Eric Gregory Award. Her first full-length collection Flèch...

Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic

May 30, 2019 00:00 - 34 minutes - 48 MB

Our latest podcast departs from our usual interview format. It's a recording of a reading held in the Scottish Poetry Library in March. The poets featured are Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic. Nina Bogin (pictured) was born in New York City and grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She attended Kirkland College and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976. She taught English and literature at the University of Technolo...

Liz Berry

April 26, 2019 00:00 - 30 minutes - 42.5 MB

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country which gave her first collection its title. Black Country won a chorus of praise, not to mention a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The collection is characterised by poems written in the Black Country dialect. Her recent pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice and was shortlisted for the Michael Ma...

Fiona Moore

March 29, 2019 00:00 - 27 minutes - 35.8 MB

Fiona Moore works today as a full-time writer but, as you’ll hear in this podcast, she joined the Foreign Office after graduating from university, and it was through this job that she lived for periods in the 1980s in Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain. Her insights into totalitarianism inspired several poems which are all too timely. She reviews poetry, having served as an assistant editor for The Rialto. In 2014, she was Saboteur Best Reviewer. Her debut pamphlet, ...

Ilyse Kusnetz and Brian Turner

February 28, 2019 00:00 - 37 minutes - 51.2 MB

The Library was saddened when we heard the American poet Ilyse Kusnetz had died in 2016; two years before her death, she'd recorded a podcast with the Library. A new collection of work, Angel Bones, written while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, is about to be published by Alice James Books. The book has been overseen into publication by Kusnetz's husband Brian Turner, a poet, editor and memoirist himself. He’s the author of the collections Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise...

Don Paterson on Aphorisms

January 31, 2019 10:57 - 20 minutes - 210 MB

Towards the end of 2018, Don Paterson came to the Scottish Poetry Library to discuss his latest book, The Fall at Home: New and Collected Aphorisms, which is published by Faber. Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, Paterson is one of Scotland's most accomplished poets, not to mention a musician, and in recent years has published several volumes of aphorisms, which are brought together in The Fall at Home. During the podcast, he discusses the relationship betwee...

Happy 100th Birthday, Muriel Spark! With Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin

December 18, 2018 00:00 - 34 minutes - 47 MB

Muriel Spark's 100th birthday was celebrated in 2018 in several ways honouring her status as arguably the greatest Scottish novelist of the twentieth century. One of the more imaginative ways came late in the year with the publication of Spark: Poetry and Art Inspired by the Novels of Muriel Spark, which was edited by poets Rob A Mackenzie and Louise Peterkin and published by Blue Diode. With contributors including Tishani Doshi, Vahni Capildeo and Sean O'Brien, the anthology does S...

Tom Pow on Alastair Reid

November 22, 2018 00:00 - 37 minutes - 52 MB

To mark the publication of Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid (Galileo), this episode is dedicated to the late poet. Alastair Reid was a poet, an essayist, translator and traveller. Born in 1926 in Galloway, he served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War before moving to the US in the early 1950s, where he was published in The New Yorker, the start of a long association with that magazine. In the decades that followed he travelled the world, establishing friends...

Tishani Doshi

October 17, 2018 00:00 - 34 minutes - 47.1 MB

Tishani Doshi's third collection Girls are Coming Out of the Woods is one of the great collections of 2018. In August, while appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Doshi visited the SPL where she spoke about the new collection. On the podcast, she discusses writing poems that address violence against women during the MeToo era, how comfortable she is to describe herself as a poet, and why Patrick Swayze is worthy of an ode.

Mark Ford

August 31, 2018 00:00 - 33 minutes - 46.1 MB

Guest interviewer Suzannah V. Evans sits down with Mark Ford in an interview recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival. Ford discusses the influence of Ashbery and O'Hara, Walt Whitman's 'children', and how he puts a set together for a reading.

Sarah Stewart and Russell Jones

July 25, 2018 11:58 - 33 minutes - 46.4 MB

Our latest episode has not one but two poets: Sarah Stewart and Russell Jones, emerging voices on the Scottish poetry scene. Both are writers and editors based in Edinburgh who have new pamphlets published by Tapsalteerie: Glisk by Stewart, Dark Matters by Jones. Jones has published several pamphlets and a full-length collection in 2015 on Freight Books, The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping. He was also co-editor of the anthology Umbrellas of Edinburgh (Freight). Glisk is Stewar...

Sean O'Brien

June 28, 2018 00:00 - 26 minutes - 36.4 MB

As the age of Brexit continues to bear down on Britain, Sean O'Brien returns with a collection called Europa (Picador). One of only two poets to win the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes for the same collection (The Drowned Book in 2007), O'Brien talks to the SPL about fascism, leaving Europe (and whether it's actually even possible) and liking bands long after they've passed they sell-by date.

Eileen Myles

May 15, 2018 00:00 - 31 minutes - 43.2 MB

Poet, novelist, and essayist Eileen Myles is a trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work 'set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match' (New York Review of Books). In March, they performed at the Scottish Poetry Library, reading from a new memoir Afterglow (A Dog Memoir). While here, we sat down with Eileen to talk about how to be an artist during the Trump era, anthropomorphism and the linguistic legacy of growing up working class. As ...

Rory Waterman

March 23, 2018 00:00 - 29 minutes - 41 MB

Rory Waterman is the author of Tonight the Summer's Over and Sarajevo Roses, both published by Carcanet. Rory was born in Belfast in 1981 before moving at an early age to Lincolnshire. Today, he's senior lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University and co-edits the poetry pamphlet series New Walk Editions. In our latest podcast, Rory Waterman discusses writing poems about Trump and Brexit, growing up the child of divorce, and running a poetry magazine.

Elaine Feinstein

February 27, 2018 00:00 - 37 minutes - 51.8 MB

Elaine Feinstein is a poet, translator, novelist, playwright and biographer. Her last collection, The Clinic, Memory (Carcanet) combines new poems with a 'best of', bringing together over half a century’s worth of work. During the podcast, Feinstein discusses anti-semitism, Donald Trump, Don Quixote and translating poetry. Image by V. Carew Hunt

Alan Spence

February 02, 2018 00:00 - 29 minutes - 40.9 MB

Our first podcast of 2018 features an interview with new Edinburgh Makar Alan Spence. Novelist, short-story writer, dramatist and, of course, poet, Spence is one of the leading lights of the Scottish literary scene. With his work informed by his Buddhism, Spence imbues his poetry with both a cosmic perspective and a Scottish sensibility to comic and enlightening effect. During the course of the interview, Spence discusses Zen and the art of poetry, working with visual artists, and t...

Peter Mackay

December 20, 2017 00:00 - 35 minutes - 49.3 MB

Pàdraig MacAoidh / Peter Mackay is a native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Lewis. He is an academic, writer and broadcaster whose work is influenced by the diverse linguistic heritage of his birthplace. His debut collection, Gu Leòr / Galore, was published by Acair. In our latest podcast, Mackay discusses repressed Scots, journalism versus poetry, and growing up bilingual.

Hera Lindsay Bird

November 28, 2017 00:00 - 30 minutes - 41.6 MB

Hera Lindsay Bird is a poet from New Zealand. Her first poetry collection, also called Hera Lindsay Bird, was published in July 2016 by Victoria University Press and quickly sold out its first print run. A UK edition was published in November 2017. In August, when Bird was in Edinburgh to take part in the Edinburgh International Book Festival, she found time to come down to the Scottish Poetry Library. While in the Library, she argued in favour of hating wisely, what it's like when ...

Henry Marsh

November 03, 2017 00:00 - 36 minutes - 49.6 MB

Henry Marsh is a Scottish poet who divides his time writing about the natural world and Scotland's troubled history. In the past, he's written about Mary Queen of Scots, John Knox and the Covenanters. In his latest collection, Under Winter Skies (Birlinn), Marsh focuses on James Graham, the first Marquess of Montrose, a brilliant soldier and poet who changed sides during the War of the Three Kingdoms. Marsh explains why he wanted to write an entire collection about this tragic figur...

Sinéad Morrissey

September 28, 2017 00:00 - 44 minutes - 60.8 MB

Winner of the 2017 Forward Prize, Sinéad Morrissey visited the Scottish Poetry Library to talk about her latest collection, On Balance (Carcanet). Morrissey grew up in Northern Ireland. At the age of 18, she won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, an early indicator of future success. She’s worked with schools, charities, prisoners, and while Laureate of Belfast, she met the Queen. Currently, she’s living in Northumberland and working in the creative writing department at the Univer...

Joni Wallace

August 24, 2017 00:00 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MB

Joni Wallace grew up in Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atom bomb. Her latest collection Kingdom Come Radio Hour (Barrow Street Press), which is inspired by her childhood, focuses on the extraordinary life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb. Wallace discusses her personal connection to Oppenheimer, 'documentary poetics', Hank Williams, and why deer appear so often in her work.

Umbrellas of Edinburgh

July 27, 2017 00:00 - 43 minutes - 60.2 MB

Last year, the publisher Freight put out an anthology called Umbrellas of Edinburgh. This collection of new work brought together poems all about Scotland’s capital. Co-edited by Claire Askew and Russell Jones, Umbrellas of Edinburgh is a poetic map of the city, from the centre and Princess Street, to the rim of the city and areas like Wester Hailes. There are also, as you’ll hear, poems about Edinburgh’s monuments and landmarks. Many of the poets you’ll hear have appeared on previo...

JL Williams: After Economy

June 29, 2017 00:00 - 33 minutes - 46 MB

JL Williams (also known as one of our former podcast hosts, Jennifer WIlliams) recently published a new collection After Economy (Shearsman), inspired by nanotechnology and a vision of a post-capitalist society. In May, she launched the book at Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery, accompanied by cellist Atzi Muramatsu. In the latest episode of the SPL's podcast series, we include excerpts of Williams' and Muramatsu's performance, plus Williams talks about the inspiration behind After Ec...

Jim Carruth

May 18, 2017 00:00 - 29 minutes - 39.8 MB

With warm words on the back of his latest collection from Douglas Dunn and Les Murray, Jim Carruth comes highly recommended. Scotland's leading living poet of its rural experience, Carruth grew up on a family farm near Kilbarchan. His first collection Bovine Pastoral was published in 2004, since when he has brought out a further five collections, the latest of which is Black Cart (Freight, 2016). In 2010 he was chosen as one of the poets showcased in Oxford Poets 2010. In 2014 he...

William Letford

April 18, 2017 00:00 - 23 minutes - 32.9 MB

Nicholas Lezard called William Letford 'the new Scottish genius', a judgement the SPL is not inclined to disagree with. With a new collection, Dirt (Carcanet), in the shops, we thought it was a good time to catch up with him. We discussed how India changed his life and poetry, whether he's funnier in Scots and the influence of work.

When Russia Met Scotland

March 23, 2017 00:00 - 36 minutes - 50.3 MB

In September 2016, the SPL, the British Council and Edwin Morgan Trust, took three Scottish poets – Stewart Sanderson, Christine De Luca and Jen Hadfield – to Russia as part of celebrations of the the UK-Russia Year of Language and Literature 2016 and the global Shakespeare Lives programme commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death. While there, they worked with three Russian poets – Marina Boroditskaya, Grigorii Kruzhkov and Lev Oborin – on translations of each other’s work. ...

Vicki Husband

February 23, 2017 00:00 - 33 minutes - 46.4 MB

Vicki Husband is one of the most interesting Scottish poets to have emerged in the past year. 2016 saw the publication of her debut This Far Back Everything Shimmers (Vagabond Voices), which was shortlisted for the Saltire Society's Scottish Poetry Book of the Year Award, where she found herself shortlisted alongside Kathleen Jamie and Don Paterson. Her poems mix science and the everyday, finding the cosmic in the quotidian and vice versa. She talks to the SPL about using bees to di...

Vahni Capildeo

January 26, 2017 00:00 - 37 minutes - 51.3 MB

‘I write because I must,’ says Vahni Capildeo, winner of the 2016 Forward Prize for Best Collection for Measures of Expatriation (published by Carcanet). ‘I think poetry,’ she says, ‘is a natural expression of humanity that has not been brutalized – which is able to take time and concentrate.’ In this podcast, Capildeo discusses the impact studying Old Norse at university had on her poetry, how women's voices are silenced, and why she objects to the word 'migrant'.