Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott, the second collection from the winner of the Seamus Heaney First Collections Prize 2020. Hosting the reading will be associate publisher at Carcanet Press, John McAuliffe. 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.

Laura Scott’s second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book’s energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth’s sense: ‘an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.’

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

Laura Scott was born in London and now lives in Norwich. Her pamphlet, What I Saw, won the Michael Marks Prize in 2014, and in 2015 she won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. Her work was featured in New Poetries VII in 2018. So Many Rooms, her first collection, was The Guardian’s Poetry Book of the Month when it came out in August 2019 and in 2020 it won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize and the East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.

John McAuliffe grew up in County Kerry, Ireland. The Gallery Press has published his five poetry collections, including A Better Life (2002) which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.