Please join us to celebrate the launch of Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips. The reading will be hosted by Seán Hewitt. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R01wCjmaSnqK0nYTWY6ofg#/registration

Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that’s rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet’s recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition – ‘tears were tears’, mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. ‘Yet the world’s still so beautiful… Sometimes it is…’ It was enough. And it still can be.

Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, Phillips’s first UK publication, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His most recent prose book is My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). Phillips lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

About the speakers:

Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). After more than thirty years of teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, he lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Seán Hewitt is the author of six books, including two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire (2020), winner of The Laurel Prize, and Rapture’s Road (2024). His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide (2022) won The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His debut novel is Open, Heaven (2025). He is an Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.