Oxfam 8 Poets Tonight

Oxfam Summer Poetry Festival 2005
Gala Reading, Thursday, August 18, 7-10 pm
OXFAM 8 POETS, featuring:
Paul Farley
Leontia Flynn
Nick Laird
Sally Read
John Stammers
John Stiles
George Szirtes
Tamar Yoseloff

(hosted by Todd Swift)

Oxfam Books & Music
91 Marylebone High StreetLondon,
W1, near Baker Street

Admission free - £8 recommended doantion - all proceeds to Oxfam

Biographical notes for the poets below.

Nick Laird
Nick Laird was born in County Tyrone in 1975. He attended Cambridge University, before working as a litigator for several years in London and Warsaw. In 2004 he was awarded an Eric Gregory award, and in 2005 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Irish Chair of Poetry Prize. His collection To A Fault appeared from Faber in January (and has been nominated for a Forward prize). His novel, Utterly Monkey, appeared from Fourth Estate in May.

John Stammers
John Stammers is a Londoner, born in Islington, where he still lives. He graduated in Philosophy from Kings’ College London and is an Associate of King’s College. His first collection Panoramic Lounge-bar (Picador 2001) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and his recent full collection Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador 2005) is Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2005 and has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Forward. He has a pamphlet called Buffalo Bills from (Donut Press

Sally Read
Sally Read has had many jobs, including teaching and psychiatric nursing, and has lived in the US, Italy, and all over the UK. She won an Eric Gregory award in 2001 and her first collection, The Point of Splitting was published by Bloodaxe this year. Some of the poems in the collection are being translated into Italian for inclusion in an anthology out with the Italian publisher Medusa next year. She is currently writing her first novel.

George Szirtes
Born in Budapest in 1948, poet and artist George Szirtes came to England as a refugee, following the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. His family settled in London and he trained as a painter in Leeds and London. His return visits to Hungary from 1984 onwards have resulted in a stream of translations into English. George Szirtes became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982 and has since won many awards for his work. He lives in Norfolk where he teaches Creative Writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design and the University of East Anglia. Much of his poetry has been collected in The Budapest File (Bloodaxe 2000) and An English Apocalypse (Bloodaxe 2001). His latest poetry collection, Reel - from Bloodaxe - was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and was awarded the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize.

Tamar Yoseloff
Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US in 1965. Her first collection, Sweetheart, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the Aldeburgh Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Barnard's Star, was published by Enitharmon in November 2004. She is currently the Programme Co-ordinator and a tutor for The Poetry School in London and also teaches creative writing at Birkbeck. She has recently been appointed Writer in Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge, as part of their Year in Literature Festival.

John Stiles
John Stiles was born in the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, Canada, and currently lives in London. As poet, novelist, and filmmaker, John has toured Europe and Canada with a hard rock band, worked as a door-to-door salesman, school teacher, and B-movie camera operator. John’s poetry, Scouts are Cancelled (Insomniac Press), novel, The Insolent Boy (Insomniac Press) and film have received accolades in Publishers Weekly, Chart Magazine and The Globe and Mail. He recently featured as one of the new Canadian Poets in New American Writing. He currently works for a church charity in Waterloo, photocopying cheques.

Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn was born in Belfast in 1974. She was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2001, and has recently completed a PhD at Queen's College, Belfast on Medbh McGuckian. These Days is her first poetry collection, and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She was selected for The Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation group.

Paul Farley
Paul Farley was born in Liverpool, England in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He won the Arvon Poetry Competition in 1996 and his first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (1998), won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award and won a Somerset Maugham Award. He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. He received an Arts Council Writers' Award in 2000 for his new collection of poems, The Ice Age (2002), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003. Paul Farley was writer in residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, from 2000-2002, and currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. In 2004, he was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Paul Farley helped judge the 2004 T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry, which was won by George Szirtes.