Hannah Copley and Isabel Galleymore at Manchester Poetry Library

If ecopoetry is your bag, then this event – featuring Isabel Galleymore and Hannah Copley in conversation – will be right up your traffic-calmed, pedestrianised street.

Isabel Galleymore is a poet, critic and lecturer with a focus on ecopoetry. Her first collection, Significant Other (Carcanet), won the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize in 2020 and her second collection, Baby Schema (also on Manchester’s Carcanet) was a PBS Recommendation in 2024. Her poems have featured in Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She has co-edited a book of insect poetry for children, published by The Emma Press. She is an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham.

Hannah Copley is a British writer and academic who works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. She is the author of two collections: Speculum (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) and last year’s brilliant and thought-provoking Lapwing (Pavilion Poetry / Liverpool University Press), which was a Poetry Book Society Summer 2024 Recommendation, won second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2024.

As well as chatting about their approaches to ecopoetry, the event will feature readings by both Isabel Galleymore and Hannah Copley, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask questions.

This event is funded by the Poetry Research Group at Manchester Metropolitan University and is part of the Poetry Reading Series at Manchester Poetry Library curated by Helen Mort. Professor Helen Mort said: ‘I’m interested in how contemporary poets engage with the more-than-human in their work, from Isabel Galleymore’s examination of “cuteness” in an era of hyper-capitalism, to Glyn Maxwell’s new poems on endangered species, to Roy Macfarlane’s experiences as canal poet laureate. How do we give voice to species and place in poetry? What are the challenges of doing so? And can poetry protect and preserve?’

Professor Helen Mort lives in Sheffield and joined the Department of English and Manchester Writing School as Lecturer in Creative Writing in September 2016. She has published three poetry collections, the Forward Prize-shortlisted The Illustrated Woman (2022), No Map Could Show Them (2016) and Division Street (2013) – winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Prize and TS Eliot Prize – and the novel Black Car Burning (2019), all with Chatto and Windus. Her memoir A Line Above The Sky was published in 2022 and shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature.