Camille Ralphs, Michael Symmons Roberts and Malika Booker at Manchester Cathedral

Join Manchester Cathedral writer-in-residence Tom Branfoot for this two-part event featuring poets Camille Ralphs, Michael Symmons Roberts and Malika Booker discussing the place of Christianity in contemporary poetry, and reading from their work.

‘From Caribbean Ritual to an Elizabethan Magus: Placing Christianity in Contemporary Poetry’ is a joint event between Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and Manchester Cathedral. A discussion at midday at Man Met’s All Saints Library will be followed by an evening poetry reading at Manchester Cathedral, with an informal launch of Camille Ralphs’ debut poetry collection with Faber & Faber, After You Were, I Am.

Camille Ralphs is a poet, critic and poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including the New York Review of Books, the Poetry Review, The Spectator and the London Magazine, and she writes critically for publications including the Telegraph, the Poetry Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books, produces a regular column for Poetry London and conducts an interview series for Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal. She has released three pamphlets: Malkin (The Emma Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award; uplifts & chains (If A Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020), and Daydream College for Bards (Guillemot Press, 2023).

Here’s what Faber says about her new collection: “In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections – ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee – obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. Ralphs’s is a startling, era-spanning utterance that draws upon a vast range of influences, from sacred texts and early modern drama to metaphysical wit, twentieth-century confessionalism and contemporary irony and mistrust. This ambitious and thrilling debut embodies the variety and singularity of living voices past and present.”

Both events are free entry, with no need to book. Wine and refreshments will be available at the reading, and books will be available to buy.