Two highly acclaimed and prize-winning English poets Katharine Towers and Zaffar Kunial come together to share their poems and talk about the roots of creativity, language and what it means to be a poet in England today.
Katharine Towers was born in London and lives in the Peak District. Her work reflects her interest in the natural world and her love of music. Both BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 have used her poems which have also appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Review, Poetry London and numerous anthologies including the Forward Book of Poetry. Her first collection, The Floating Man (2010) won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. It was also on the shortlist for the Ted Hughes Award, New Work in Poetry; and for the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. The Remedies (2016), her second collection, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. Her most recent 2021 collection Oak was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. A poem from The Floating Man appeared as a Poem on the Underground. Her work is published by Picador Poetry.
“Quite how she manages the balancing act between entertainment and something that comes close to a prayer, that catches in your throat, is beyond me.“ Kate Kellaway in The Observer
Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Hill Speak’. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Us (2018), which made the shortlist for both the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In Us, Kunial, the son of an English mother and a Kashmiri father, takes his own identity as his central subject. Faber & Faber published his new collection, England’s Green in 2022. Zaffar is one of this year’s winners of the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize.
“Witty, playful and heart-breaking by turns . . . a wonderful poetic of loopholes, portals and translations, and of the magic in-between.“ Sinead Morrissey, Chair of the Judges, T S Eliot Prize
