Ian Duhig at Nowt But Verse Leeds Lit Fest special
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Poet, editor and host of the monthly series of talks with writers Nowt But Verse Hannah Stone welcomes prize-winning poet Ian Duhig to this Leeds Lit Fest special, when they will chat about poetry and being a poet, and Ian will perform a long-awaited reading from his New and Selected Poems.
Published by Picador in 2021, Ian Duhig’s New and Selected Poems was recently awarded the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature.
Published by Picador in 2021, Ian Duhig’s New and Selected Poems was recently awarded the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature. It was also named a Poetry Book of the Year by both The Guardian and Irish Times, and crowned Book of the Year by The Observer and Times Literary Supplement.
Multi-award-winning and many times shortlisted for his work, Ian Duhig was born in 1954, the eighth of 11 children, to Irish parents “with a liking for poetry”. He has won the National Poetry Competition twice, first in 1989 and again in 2000. His first collection, The Bradford Count, came out with Bloodaxe in 1991 and was shortlisted for the Forwards, and he was chosen as a New Generation Poet in 1994. His fourth collection, The Lammas Hireling (Picador, 2003), was the Poetry Book Society’s Choice for Summer 2003 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, and the title poem picked up the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2001, as well as the National in 2000. His fifth book, The Speed Of Dark (Picador, 2007), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot and Costa Prizes, and his seventh – The Blind Roadmaker, published in 2016 by Picador – was shortlisted for the Eliot as well as the Forward Prize for Best Collection.
He has held various Royal Literary Fund fellowships at universities including Lancaster, Durham, Newcastle and his own alma mater, Leeds.
This event is part of Leeds Lit Fest, running 25 February to 5 March, featuring all manner of events from horror stories with Catriona Ward and Dan Coxon to memoir with Lemn Sissay. There’s a special Chemistry spoken word event, featuring Dominic Berry (and, at time of writing, sold out!), and another regular, Chelping, returns to this very venue later in the month, on 16 March.
