Please join us to celebrate the launch of In the Quaker Hotel by Helen Tookey. Hosting the reading will be writer and critic Seán Hewitt, joining Helen to discuss the new book. 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.

In the title poem, the speaker sits at the window of a small hotel room. The room is a holding zone, a temporary stopping-place between memory and possibility. In the Quaker Hotel is full of questions about the world. Rooted in nature, the poems are fearful for it. They move out through identifiable landscapes (Merseyside, north Wales, Nova Scotia, southern France) to off-kilter, tilted places beyond our immediate reality. We are temporary guests in these places and in our own lives. Who will come after us, how will they see things: ‘who will tend the bees / in the communal garden’?

Helen Tookey experiments with form and theme, as in her earlier books Missel-Child (Carcanet, 2014, shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize) and City of Departures (Carcanet, 2019, shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection).

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.