LITFEST: Poetry Double Bill (1): Fiona Benson & Blake Morrison

Fiona Benson’s new collection, Midden Witch, enters the world of familiars, fables and hedgemagic, to present a company of artists, dreamers and outcasts, and consider how gifted and sometimes troubled individuals – mainly women – became scapegoats for society’s paranoia.

‘These are poems cast as beautiful, intricate spells, reminding us there is more to life than we can hope to explain’ Rishi Dastidar, Guardian

In Afterburn, his first collection for ten years, Blake Morrison returns to poetry, his first calling, to offers scenes from his own life and the lives of others, and in two extraordinary sequences – one about his sister, the other about Elizabeth Bishop – he sees with new eyes the turning points in a life's accidental course.

'A master of the sonnet . . . I’m taking Afterburn to my desert island' Hugo Williams

Authors:

Fiona Benson is the prize-winning author of three collections, Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost (Forward Best Collection, 2019) and Ephemeron, all of which were shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize.

Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and critic, whose poetry collections include Dark Glasses, Shingle Street and A Discoverie of Witches, and the classic memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Things My Mother Never Told Me and Two Sisters.

AGE GUIDANCE: 16+

Photo credits: Blake Morrison by Sarah Lee