Update:
Due to the new UCU strike dates announced on Friday, the book launch for Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry (CUP, 2022) will have to be postponed.
We’ll announce an alternative to March 31st as soon as we can re-book the date with Manchester Poetry Library.
In the meantime, if you signed up via the Eventbrite link below, you should receive an email stating that your ticket is secure.
The launch of Antony Rowlands’s monograph Metamodernism and Contemporary British Poetry, published by Cambridge University Press, will be the next event for the AHRC Metamodernism Network on Thursday the 31st March, at 6pm.
This event will take place at the Manchester Poetry Library at Manchester Metropolitan University and will feature readings and performances by some of the poets discussed in the book, including Sandeep Parmar, Scott Thurston and James Byrne. Specially-commissioned performances by the Irish singer Noirin Ni Riain, who has been praised by Sinead O’Connor and Anjelica Huston, will also form part of the launch.
To get free tickets to attend in person please follow the link to the Eventbrite page.
For those who are unable to attend the event in person, a recording of the readings and performances will be made available online shortly afterwards.
Antony Rowland is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published nine books, including The Land of Green Ginger (Salt, 2008), I Am a Magenta Stick (Salt, 2012) and M (Arc, 2017). He was awarded the 10K Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012, and his poems have been anthologised in Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), and New Poetries III (Carcanet, 2003). He recorded for the National Poetry Archive in 2009, and the Lyrikline (Berlin) in 2014. The Dutch government elected him as a UK poetry ‘ambassador’ for 2016: his poetry was read on national television, and shown on screens at Schipol airport and Amsterdam Central Station.
Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her poetry collections include The Marble Orchard (Shearsman 2012) and Eidolon (Shearsman 2015). She is also the author of Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman (Bloomsbury 2013), and the editor of The Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet 2011) and Nancy Cunard’s Selected Poems (Carcanet 2016). Sandeep’s essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing.
Scott Thurston is a Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. He first began writing poetry in the vortex of the London experimental poetry scene in the late 1980s when he regularly attended the Sub-Voicive poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops. He is currently the Creative Writing/Research Lead for the English Literature, Language and Creative Practice Research Group at Salford, and his books include Hold: poems 1994-2004 (Shearsman 2006), Internal Rhyme (Shearsman, 2010), Talking Poetics (Shearsman, 2010), Poems for the Dance (Aquifer, 2017) and Phrases towards a Kinepoetics (2020).
James Byrne is a Reader in Contemporary Literature at Edge Hill University. He edited The Wolf magazine from 2002 to 2017, and was the poet in residence at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2011-12). James’ most recent poetry collections include Places You Leave (Arc, 2021), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, 2015), White Coins (Arc, 2015) and Blood/Sugar (Arc, 2009). He was awarded the Treci Trg poetry festival prize in Serbia in 2008, and his New and Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in 2009. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009).
Noirin Ni Riain is an Irish singer, writer, teacher, theologian, and authority on Gregorian Chant (plainchant, plainsong). She is primarily known for spiritual songs, but also sings Celtic music, Sean-nós and Indian songs. Nóirín plays an Indian harmonium surpeti, shruti box and feadóg (whistle). She was Artist-in-Residence for Wexford and Laois. The singer Sinead O’Connor has referred to Noirin as ‘my biggest influence and heroine in music’ and the film director Anjelica Huston has commented that Noirin ‘has the voice of a Byzantine angel’.