Event Categories: Poetry & Spoken Word

Following a sold out appearance at Wrecking Ball Arts Centre in late 2021, poet Hollie McNish returns to the venue on July 13, this time joined by prize-winning poet, writer and Neu! Reekie! co-founder Michael Pedersen.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet, scribbler, stitcher. He’s produced two acclaimed collections of poetry (Polygon Books) with a poetic prose debut, Boy Friends, which will be published by Faber & Faber in July 2022. He won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, the John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award, and was a finalist for the 2018 ‘Writer of the Year’ at The Herald Scottish Culture Awards. With work anthologised by the likes of Pan MacMillan and Canongate Books, his writing has attracted plaudits from voices as luscious as: Irvine Welsh, Jackie Kay, Stephen Fry & Charlotte Church. Pedersen also co-runs and co-founded the literary collective Neu! Reekie!, who’ve been launching poetic rockets for over ten years noo.

You are invited to join Matt Nicholson as he launches his fourth poetry collection – Untanglement – published by Yaffle Press. Accompanied by special guests Helen Mort and Dean Wilson, plus other guests to be announced, at the Wrecking Ball Arts Centre, on Friday 10th June, from 7.30pm.

Matt is a poet, proud of his East Yorkshire roots, and Untanglement is the product of those roots, of years of learning, self-analysis and watching the world and people change. It follows on from 3 successful prior publications and many miles of travelling the UK to read his work.

Special Guests

Helen Mort is a poet and novelist. Her collections Division Street and No Map Could Show Them are published by Chatto and her third, The Illustrated Woman is due in 2022. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Dean Wilson – a poet, a painter, and, on the Holderness coast, the King of Pebbles. Dean once described himself as the 4th best poet in Hull but those who have seen and heard him on stage know better!

Local legends, actor and director Barrie Rutter, award-winning folk musician Eliza Carthy, original Hull Truck member and actor Alan Williams, Hull’s fourth best poet Dean Wilson and actor Rachel Dale will combine forces to present a unique evening of story telling, poetry and music based around a maritime theme.

From classic poems about sailors, fishermen and the sea, tall ships to trawlers, tall tales to sea shanties, anecdotes to ballads, this power ensemble promise to entertain.

Join us at the Wrecking Ball Arts Centre for an evening of poetry from Carcanet Press published poets.

Katherine Horrex, Charlotte Eichler and Maryam Hessavi will all read their work at this event.

Charlotte Eichler is a poet based in West Yorkshire.  Her work has recently appeared in Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII anthology, and magazines including PN Review, Stand and The Island Review.  In 2020 she won the Barjeel Poetry prize.  Her debut pamphlet, ‘Their Lunar Language’, came out with Valley Press in 2018.

Maryam Hessavi is a freelance writer, poet and critic.  She currently works as the Assistant Reviews Editor for The Poetry School and Contributing Editor for Ambit.  Her work has featured in various publications and was recently selected for Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII anthology.  She is also a member of the Ledbury Poetry Critics.

Katherine Horrex grew up in Hull. Her first poetry collection Growlery was published by Carcanet in 2020 and has so far received acclaim in the Guardian, Forward Prizes, Sabotage and Morning Star.  It is a collection which dwells on a world of civic tensions, in the twilit zone between city and country. Most recently, it was a finalist in the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize.  Katherine works as a tutor in a secondary school in Salford.

Carcanet Press is one of the outstanding independent literary publishers of our time. Now in its fifth decade, Carcanet publishes the most comprehensive and diverse list available of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, as well as a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism.