Carcanet online book launch: Collected Poems by Mimi Khalvati

Just last year Mimi Khalvati received the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry, awarded for excellence in poetry, so it seems perfect timing that Manchester’s Carcanet Press launches her Collected Poems. Expect from these a wide variety of style, tone and architecture – both free and metrical verse, short, fixed forms like ghazals and extended lyrical sequences, such as the corona or book-length series of sonnets. Mimi Khalvati will be reading from the new tome and chatting about her work and processes with fellow poet Hannah Lowe.

Khalvati was 47 when her first book of poems, In White Ink, was published in 1991; the title is a nod to the French feminist writer and critic Hélène Cixous, who observed that women write ‘in white ink’, using the body as language. Khalvati is now 80 and has nine poetry collections to her name. All out with Carcanet Press, they include The Meanest Flower, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize in 2007, Child: New and Selected Poems 1991-2011, a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation, 2014’s The Weather Wheel, a PBS Commendation and a book of the year in The Independent, and 2019’s Afterwardness, a book of the year in The Sunday Times and The Guardian.

She was a co-winner of the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition 1989 and Smith/Doorstop (which runs the competition) published her Very Selected Poems in 2017. She has been Poet in Residence at the Royal Mail and has held fellowships at the International Writing Program in Iowa as the recipient of the William B Quarton International Writing Program Scholarship, at the American School in London and at the Royal Literary Fund, City University. She is the founder of The Poetry School and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of The English Society, and her awards include a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, and grew up on the Isle of Wight. She has lived most of her life since the age of 17 in London. After training at Drama Centre London, she worked as an actor in the UK and as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran and on the fringe in London. The loss of her native country, culture and mother tongue has formed the bedrock of her adoptive love of the English language and its lyric tradition.

‘But,’ she says, ‘whether drawing on my few memories of Iran, my long years in London and travelling in the Mediterranean, or on that central void always facing me, I have celebrated the richness of a life that can be lived without a clear sense of heritage, family history or personal biography.

‘I hope the poems speak especially to those who have made their homes wherever the tide has brought them, sometimes in language itself, and to those who have no story but place their trust in the flux and flow, the vision of the lyric moment.’

Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University. Her most recent book, The Kids (2021), won the Costa Poetry Award and the Costa Book of the Year. Her first poetry collection, Chick (2013), won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In 2014, she was selected by the Poetry Book Society for the 20 Next Generation poets “expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade” and, in 2015, her family memoir Long Time, No See featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

As always with Carcanet Press events, extracts of the text will be shown during the reading so that you can read along, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. Registration for this online event is £2, redeemable against the cost of the book – attendees will receive a discount code and details of how to get hold of the new book during and after the event.