Jason Allen-Paisant and John McAuliffe
Sunday 27th July at 3pm
An afternoon of world class poetry, brilliant memoir and homemade cake
Jason Allen-Paisant’s extraordinary Self Portrait as Othello won both of the UK’s most prestigious poetry awards in 2023 – The Forward and TS Eliot Prizes.
He will also be reading from his brand new memoir The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams. Journeying from Jamaican hills to the woodlands of Leeds, the book reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain, and what that rural village, its plants and its people, taught Jason about the possibility of tenderness, the permission to roam England, land ownership and reclamation.
Jason is Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and an associate editor of Callaloo Literary Journal. He lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.
“profound and lyrical…..”
“work of delicacy, wonder and – yes – great tenderness”
“playful, intimate and allusive…..”
John McAuliffe’s seven acclaimed books of poetry from Ireland’s Gallery Press include The Kabul Olympics (2020), which was a TLS and Irish Times book of the year, a Selected Poems, published in the UK and Ireland in 2022 and in the US by Wake Forest Press in 2023, and last October a new collection National Theatre. John grew up in Listowel, County Kerry.
He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Manchester, Associate Publisher at Carcanet Press and co-editor of PN Review.
“His sure hand is apparent in every line: syntax and pulse in the service of experience” (August Kleinzahler)
“For all the amiable good humour of the voice of these poems, they never stray far from the things that really matter in a modern life. The domain of the imagined is always at the service of the world we know, to cast light on it.”
(Bernard O’Donoghue)