This series showcases under-represented writers and artists and how they got their work ‘out there’. They aim to inform and inspire and give you the opportunity to meet practicing professional artists and writers.
Poetry has been a means of self-expression for Alan Morrison for over twenty years; it has been a medium through which he has been able to explore and try and make sense of his own obsessional mind, while also confronting in poetry some of the most challenging social and political themes of the times.
Alan will talk about how the personal and the political have always sparred in his poetry; of how the most authentic occupation he ever had was as a voluntary poetry workshop tutor in a psychiatric hospital; of the conflict between poetic occupation and conventional employment, and the ‘occupational hazard’ for many poets of intermittent or even long-term unemployment. He will read from his latest collection, Tan Raptures, which is themed around the welfare cuts and their catastrophic effects.
Alan Morrison is the author of several critically acclaimed poetry collections which include A Tapestry of Absent Sitters (Waterloo Press, 2009), Keir Hardie Street (Smokestack Books, 2010), Captive Dragons (Waterloo Press, 2011), Blaze a Vanishing/The Tall Skies (Waterloo Press, 2013), Shadows Waltz Haltingly (Lapwing, 2015) and Tan Raptures (Smokestack Books, 2017). He is editor of The Recusant (www.therecusant.org.uk).
He edited two ground-breaking anti-austerity anthologies, Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State (2011) and The Robin Hood Book – Verse Versus Austerity (2012). His poetry has been awarded grants from the Arts Council, the Royal Literary Fund and the Society of Authors.
For more about Alan, see www.alanmorrison.co.uk
Fee: £3 suggested donation
Date: Thursday 18 January 2018
Time: 2:00-3:00pm
Venue: New Writing South, 9 Jew Street, Brighton BN1 1UT
This event is British Sign Language-interpreted
View our other ‘Meet the Writer’ event here
NB: These events are open to the pubic, but under-represented artists and writers will take priority if the event is fully booked.
How to book
Bookings are closed for this event.