We’re delighted to be working with the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing to host Tara Bergin and Zaffar Kunial as part of their Literature Live series. Tara and Zaffar will be reading from and discussing their latest collections SAVAGE TALES and ENGLAND’S GREEN with host John McAuliffe.

About the books:

Savage Times – Tara Bergin

Tara Bergin’s third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin’s book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.

England’s Green – Zaffar Kunial

Zaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light. In the poems of England’s Green, we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the ‘dark missing / step in a stair’, entering this new world with bated breath. By such close attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken. Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures – a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.

About the authors:

Tara Bergin is an Irish poet. Her first collection, This is Yarrow (2013), won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry, and the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. She received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and chosen as Best Poetry Book of the year by The Times and The Irish Times. She now lives in the North of England.

Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of ‘Hill Speak’ at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem ‘The Word’.

Doors: 6.30, event starts: 6.45

Tickets are £3 or free when purchasing a copy of either book. SAVAGE TIMES and ENGLAND’S GREEN will also be available to purchase on the night and Tara and Zaffar will be signing copies after the talk. If you would like a signed copy but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.