Join us for a wonderful evening to celebrate the launch of pandemonium, the new poetry collection by Andrew McMillan. Andrew will perform readings from the collection, followed by conversation with Malika Booker and audience Q&A.

After two prize-winning collections which examined the intimacies and intricacies of the physical body, Andrew McMillan’s third book marks a shift: both inward, into the difficult world of mental health, and outwards into the natural and political world.

Manchester Poetry Library and the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University are delighted to host this book launch, which will also feature an introduction by Becky Swain, Director of Manchester Poetry Library.

For any queries about the event, please email Manchester Poetry Library: poetrylibrary@mmu.ac.uk.

More about pandemonium:
McMillan has been celebrated for his unflinchingly frank depictions of the body and sexual love, but these new poems are raw dispatches from a mind in freefall, a body in trouble. Addressing a period of acute depression, they are less about physical union and completeness and more about fracture and distance: tender, savagely moving poems which stare, unblinkingly, into the sudden havoc and hurt of this world, searching for – and finally finding – some redemption.

Andrew McMillan
Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award and a Northern Writers’ award. His second collection playtime was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018 and won the inaugural Polari Prize. Andrew is senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Manchester.

Malika Booker
Malika Booker is an award-winning poet, theatre-maker and multi-disciplinary artist. She is the founder of the Malika’s Poetry Kitchen writers’ community initiative. Her first collection of poetry, Pepper Seed, was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2013. In 2019 she was awarded a prestigious Society of Authors Cholmondley Award for her contribution to poetry. In 2020, she won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for ‘The Little Miracles’. She joined Manchester Metropolitan University as a Lecturer in Creative Writing in January 2019 and is Chair of Judges for the international Manchester Poetry Prize.