Please join us to celebrate the launch of Apple Thieves by Beverley Bie Brahic.

The reading will be hosted by Katie Peterson. 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_HBoxIK1zR-OHkj31277csQ#/registration

‘I am drawn to paintings that catch glimpses of ordinary people in rooms that lead to other rooms,’ Beverley Bie Brahic says. Apple Thieves is full of such painterly moments, remembered or caught on the fly, with their charge of mystery, like this shell – ‘an empty house / a nudge will set rocking / almost indefinitely’ – collected on the coast of her native British Columbia, whose diverse populations and their migrations she evokes in ‘Root Vegetables’. Today, long resident in France, she relishes Paris – ‘Smelling of piss and baking bread / The city in its glory and dereliction’ – ‘time-hedged cottages’ and the earthbound in all its fragility.

‘In her original poems, [Beverley Bie Brahic] characteristically moves towards compassionate celebration. Both the short lyrics and the more discursive narratives in her collections are richly and variously peopled, and the Mediterranean glow of generous physicality extends to fruits, flowers and an abundant natural world.’
Carol Rumens, The Guardian

About the speakers:

Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Beverley Bie Brahic grew up in Vancouver; today she lives in France. Apple Thieves is her fifth collection of poetry after Catch and Release, winner of the 2019 Wigtown Book Festival Alistair Reid Pamphlet Prize; The Hotel Eden; The Hunting of the Boar, a 2016 PBS Recommendation; White Sheets, a 2013 Forward Prize finalist for Best Collection and PBS Recommendation; and Against Gravity. Her many translations include books by Yves Bonnefoy, Helene Cixous, and Charles Baudelaire; The Little Auto, her selection of Guillaume Apollinaire’s First World War poems, was awarded the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, was a finalist for the 2009 Popescu Translation Prize. She has received a Canada Council for the Arts Writing Grant and fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in 2024. Her previous collections include Life in a Field, the winner of the Omnidawn Open Books Prize (2021), A Piece of Good News, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and The Accounts (2013), winner of the RIlke Prize from the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared widely in journals including the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Poetry London, and Raritan. She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis, where she is Professor of English and a Chancellor’s Fellow. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she will be a Visiting Fellow at St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford University.