The start of a 10-year adventure.
This is an online event hosted on the British Library platform. Bookers will be sent a link in advance giving access .
“I want to celebrate the physical space of libraries and take my work back into places that have given me so much.”
Each spring for the next decade, Simon Armitage will give readings across the UK, from the flagship libraries of the big cities to smaller libraries serving rural and remote communities. Using the alphabet as a compass, his journey will celebrate the library as one of the great and necessary institutions. Join us online in the first week of his 10-year adventure for this headline event live-streamed from the grand British Library Entrance Hall.
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Andrew McMillan, said, “Our shortlist celebrated the ways in which poetry is responding to profound change, and the stylistic freedom that today’s poets have claimed. From this impressive field, we unanimously chose Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart as our winner. It is a radical and arresting collection that recalibrates what it’s possible for poetry to achieve.”
Bhanu Kapil was born in England to Indian parents, and she grew up in a South Asian, working-class community in London. She lives between the UK and the US, where she spent 21 years at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of six books of poetry/prose: