Please join us to celebrate the launch of Sleepers Awake by Oli Hazzard. The reading will be hosted by writer and researcher Jess Cotton. 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.

Oli Hazzard’s third collection emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract ‘the ore / from boredom’, as memory – personal, familial, social, historical – and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential.

The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book’s dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. Through satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing ‘through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in sceptical company’.

About the speakers:

Oli Hazzard is the author of two books of poems, Between Two Windows (Carcanet, 2012) and Blotter (Carcanet, 2018), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Glasgow.

Jess Cotton is an early career researcher at the University of Cambridge and the author of John Ashbery (Reaktion, 2023).