cats night out
Cats Night Out is a vibrant and eclectic mix of the best of contemporary women's poetry in a relaxed atmosphere. There's also a chance for new voices to air their talent in a limited number of floor spots for women.
This season's poets includes: Patience Agbabi, Moniza Alvi, Marilyn Hacker and Cherry Smyth.
Many more to be announced soon...watch this space!
Monica Alvi was born in Pakistan in 1954 and grew up in Hertfordshire. She has published four books of poetry including The Country At My Shoulder which was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 2002 and a volune of her poems in translation was published in Holland last year
"Moniza Alvi's world is a place of wild energy..."PBS Bulletin
Kate Clanchy won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Slattern, gaining her a reputation as a poet of great immediacy and wit. This has been followed by Samarkand and her latest, and most accomplished book to date Newborn which considers the incredible experience of having a baby.
"A real discovery" Helen Dunmore
Cherry Smyth is author of When The Lights Go Up (Lagan Press,2001) and editor of A Strong Voice In A Small Space (Cherry Picking Press, 2002) an anthology of poems by women in prison which won the Raymond Williams Community Publishing Award in 2003.
Being Irish informs her work which also appears in several anthologies and includes the screenplay for the short film Salvage.
Polly Clark won an Eric Gregory Award in 1997 and her first collection Kisswas a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has pursued a number of careers including zookeeping at Edinburgh Zoo. She was one of the 2001 National Poetry Day Poets, selected by Andrew Motion and in 2004 was chosen as one of Mslexia's ten best poets to emerge in the last decade. She is poet in residence for the Daily Echo in Southampton, and is currently a guest editor for Poetry London Magazine.
One of Ireland's liveliest and most popular poets she is a gutsy, anarchic chronicler of the Irish dispossessed, who writes provocative and heartwarming poems of high jinks, jittery grief and telling social comment. Born in Galway, where she still lives, she left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has published seven books of poetry. An Awful Racket is her latest collection from Bloodaxe.
'A brilliantly spiky, surreal blend of humour and social issues - a witty mix of the erotic and the upfront political from a female perspective.'
Ruth Padel, Independent on Sunday
Kona Macphee was born in London, and grew up in Australia. She's worked as a waitress, shop assistant and apprentice motorbike mechanic, studied musical composition at the Sydney Conservatorium, and computer science and robotics at Monash University, and currently works in astronomy as a software developer. She received an Eric Gregory Award for poetry in 1998. Her first full collection, Tails is an auspicious debut by a highly original writer who has already been called 'one of the strongest new figures in British poetry' Roddy Lumsden.
Sheenagh Pugh is a poet,translator and novelist who was born in Wales and lives in Cardiff. Her vivid, richly inventive and accessible poetry has many admirers and she has won numerous awards, including the Forward Prize for best single poem, The Babel Prize for translation, and The Cardiff International Poetry Prize. Her ninth collection, The Beautiful Lie (Seren) deals with the boundaries between truth and fiction. She is a lecturer in creative writing at The University of Glamorgan.
"Sheenagh Pugh is a very wicked poet". Roger McGough
An exhilarating performance poet, Aoife Mannix was born in Stockholm of Irish parents and grew up in Dublin and New York. She won the Farrago Poetry Slam in 2001, and has performed her poetry internationally, most recently as part of a British Council tour of Austria. Her first chapbook,The Trick of Foreign Words has just been published by Tall Lighthouse. Her poetry and short stories have been broadcast and widely published in magazines and anthologies, and she has written two drama documentaries for BBC Radio 4.
"Angela Kirby's poems delight with feisty detail and move us with their honesty and directness" Maurice Riordan
"A feast of a book - a stunningly robust debut collection." Brendan Kennelly
Mary Baine Campbell is an American poet and literary critic. Her first collection, THE WORLD, The Flesh and Angels, won the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and her second and recent collection, Trouble, is published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She teaches at Brandeis University, is the author of two books of literary criticism and cultural history, and is currently working on a libretto about a werewolf and his wife.
"Lucid, haunting, irresistibly truthtelling poetry." Eve Sedgwick about Trouble
Angela Dove was born and raised in Yorkshire and has had careers as a theatre designer, actor, and a teacher in museums. Her poems have been published in numerous magazines, in the anthology Four Caves Of The Heart (Second Light Publications), and in Parents ( Enitharmon). Her first pamphlet collection is Cabinet of Wonders (Vernier Press). She founded and directs the Cats Night Out series of poetry readings, and writes, teaches and researches on the design of libraries and other learning spaces.
"This is wild, disturbing poetry, and in their deceptive way, these poems are profoundly theatrical - a genuinely exciting collection." UA Fanthorpe on Cabinet of Wonders
A rare opportunity to hear Marilyn Hacker, one of the USA's strongest poets of conscience, reading from her work. Author of ten books, her numerous honours include a National Book Award for Presentation Piece. In her latest collection Desperanto, she writes of two cities, her native New York and adopted Paris, and continues to explore her abiding themes of loss, exile and return, with a searching intelligence and urbane humour.
"There is no finer poet alive than Marilyn Hacker." Carolyn Kizer
£7 / £5 concessions