Garlands and Detours: double book launch and open mic online

Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Poet Anne Caldwell
Poet Anne Caldwell.

26 November 2020 Entrance is free — Visit now

We’re off over the Pennines for this double reading, entitled “Garlands and Detours” and hosted by Leeds Libraries and award-winning Yorkshire publisher Valley Press, based in sunny Scarborough. Anne Caldwell is launching her fourth collection, Alice and the North, a sequence of prose poems described as forming a love song to the North, while Matthew Hedley Stoppard will be reading from his second, The Garland King. There will also be an open mic section featuring 10 performers.

The lead character of Alice and the North journeys across the post-industrial landscapes and wild uplands of northern England, “straddling the territory between prose and poetry”.

Anne Caldwell is a writer and education specialist based in West Yorkshire. Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing for the Open University, she previously taught at The University of Bolton, recently gaining a PhD in prose poetry there, and she has worked for NAWE and the British Council, as Literature Programme Manager. Her poetry has appeared in a range of anthologies and journals in the UK and internationally, including The Rialto, Writing Women, The North, Poetry Wales and Stride. She has published three collections with Cinnamon Press, including 2016’s Painting the Spiral Staircase, and in 2019 she co-edited with Oz Hardwick The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, featuring familiar names including Poet Laureate Simon Armitage alongside Inua Ellams, Carrie Etter, Jen Hadfield, Luke Kennard, Kim Moore, Helen Mort and George Szirtes.

Taking Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland Alice as inspiration, the lead character of Alice and the North journeys across the post-industrial landscapes and wild uplands of northern England, “straddling the territory between prose and poetry”, and needling the “titans” of Northern poetry, Ted Hughes and the aforementioned Armitage, as she goes. Fellow poet Alison Brackenbury says: “Anne Caldwell’s poems are intensely alive, flighty as young animals, powerful and varied as the sea.”

Matthew Hedley Stoppard was born in Derbyshire in 1985. After a brief career as a journalist, he now works as a librarian, and lives in Otley, just north of Leeds, with his wife and two sons. The Otley Town Poet, in fact, his work has been published by Cake and Magma, among others, and his debut solo collection, A Family Behind Glass, came out with Valley Press in 2013, and was included in the Guardian‘s Readers’ Books of the Year. The Garland King, hitting the shelves this month, is described as creating “an uncanny space where traditional customs and modern anxieties mix” – Morris dancers, for example, melt in the midst of a climate emergency in one of the pieces.

Anne Caldwell Alice and the North cover
Anne Caldwell Alice and the North cover

26 November 2020 Entrance is free Visit now

Where to go near Garlands and Detours: double book launch and open mic online

Manchester
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Fairfield Social Club

Launching in spring 2024, Fairfield Social Club is a multi-purpose site next to Angel Meadows Park in the Green Quarter.

Cumbria
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The Coro

Nestled in the heart of Ulverston, a rural market town on the fringes of the Lake District, stands The Coro —an esteemed historic hub for arts, culture, and entertainment

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Sam Read Bookseller

Award-winning small bookshop in the Lake District. Est. by Sam Read in 1887. Run by Will Smith and Polly Atkin.

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Capri

Capri serves up homely, family-style Italian food in North Yorkshire.

Manchester
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Manchester Wine Tours

Manchester Wine Tours is a relaxed, fun wine tour, taking in four or five venues across three hours, plus six high-quality glasses of wine.

Sheffield
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Juno Books

Friendly local queer and intersectional feminist bookshop in Sheffield. Visit for interesting fiction and non fiction books.

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The Dusty Miller

Family friendly pub situated in the beautiful village of Mytholmroyd.

Winckley Square
Lancashire
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Winckley Square

Hosting a variety of year-round events, from guided walks to jazz evenings, Winckley Square is a Georgian square packed with history in Preston city centre.

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