Please join us across various events at the Poetry in Aldeburgh festival on the 8-10th November, and see Paul Stephenson, Mimi Khalvati, Kit Fan and Caroline Bird read and host workshops!

Tickets are available here.

Friday 8th November
14:15-15:45 Mimi Khalvati: Water Three Ways Workshop in Courtyard Gallery at Ballroom Arts

 
Saturday 9th November
10:15-11:45 Kit Fan: Poem and Octopus Workshop in Courtyard Gallery at Ballroom Arts
15:30-16:30 Paul Stephenson: Reading, Reveal and Raffle at Ballroom Arts Upstairs
20:00-21:00 Caroline Bird: Festival Gala Reading at Aldeburgh Cinema

 
Sunday 10th November
10:45-11:45 Caroline Bird: The Dark Implications of a Silly Idea Workshop in Courtyard Gallery at Ballroom Arts
10:30-11:30 Kit Fan: Red Bean Poetry Reading at Ballroom Arts Upstairs
14:00-15:45 Mimi Khalvati: Closing Event Reading at Ballroom Arts Upstairs
 
For more information, and to buy tickets, click here.


Paul Stephenson's debut collection Hard Drive was published by Carcanet in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in the US and is currently longlisted for the Polari Book Prize. He previously published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). In 2013/14 he took part in the Jerwood/Arvon mentoring scheme and the Aldeburgh Eight, before completing an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) with the Manchester Writing School. In 2018 he co-edited the Europe issue of Magma (70) and currently helps programme Poetry in Aldeburgh. He is a university teacher and researcher, and lives between Cambridge and Brussels.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. She has published nine poetry collections with Carcanet Press, including The Meanest Flower, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and her Very Selected Poems appeared from Smith/Doorstop in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B. Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and has co-edited its three anthologies of new writing published by Enitharmon Press. Her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors, a major Arts Council Award and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society. In 2023 she was awarded the King's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His first poetry collection, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize. As Slow as Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize. He won the Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and for Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and Poetry Magazine Editors' Prize for Reviewing. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). The Ink Cloud Reader is his third poetry collection. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.  In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022.