Please join us to celebrate the online launch of Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders. The event will be hosted by Luke Kennard. It 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, 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.

In Tristram Fane Saunders’ first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances.

Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are ‘trying to tilt toward love’, but ‘can’t help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest. They discover wry humour in that struggle.

About the speakers:

Tristram Fane Saunders lives in London and works as a journalist. He is the author of five pamphlets including The Rake (The Poetry Business, 2022), and is the editor of Edna St Vincent Millay: Poems and Satires (Carcanet, 2021). His poems have appeared in The TLS, The White Review and Poetry Ireland Review.

Luke Kennard is a poet and writer of fiction who was born in Kingston Upon Thames in 1981. He won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2005 and his first collection of prose poems The Solex Brothers was published later that year by Stride. His second collection The Harbour Beyond the Movie was published by Salt in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the youngest writer ever to be shortlisted. His collection A Lost Expression was released in 2012 alongside an experimental short story, Holophin, which won the Saboteur Novella award that year. His most recent collection, Cain, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2016 and shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. His fiction and poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, Times Literary Supplement and The National (Abu Dhabi). He has a PhD in English from the University of Exeter and lectures at the University of Birmingham. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once per-decade list. His first novel, The Transition, was BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and his second novel The Answer to Everything will be published in 2021.