Poetry at the Dusty Miller
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
Poetry at the Dusty Miller is a brand-new night with invited readers, organised by Carcanet-published Carola Luther and Judith Willson in the Coiners’ Room in the Mytholmroyd pub. The reading series is making its first appearance before Christmas, then will be back in the new year on Tuesday 6 February, Tuesday 5 March, Tuesday 7 May,and Tuesday 4 June 2024.
The first four guests are the poets Steve Ely, Gaia Holmes, Andrew McMillan and Charlotte Wetton, all with connections to Yorkshire.
Dr Steve Ely is an award-winning poet, novelist and biographer from Yorkshire. Shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry 2013, he is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield and Director of the Ted Hughes Network. He . Oswald’s Book of Hours was his first published book of poetry; his second, Englaland, was published by Smokestack in 2015. His most recent publications are Lectio Violant and The European Eel (both 2021).
Gaia Holmes is a graduate of Huddersfield University’s English with Creative Writing BA and has been a poet in residence at Bradford Library as well as a creative writing lecturer. Her debut poetry collection, Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed, was published in 2006; her second, Lifting the Piano with One Hand, was published in 2013; her third, Where The Road Runs Out, was published in 2017. All were published by Comma Press. She is currently working on short fiction for her debut short story collection, He Used To Do Dangerous Things.
Andrew McMillan has a new “short and magnificent debut novel”, Pity, out with Cannongate in February. His debut poetry collection physical was the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Charlotte Wetton’s first pamphlet, I Refuse to Turn into a Hat-Stand, was published by Calder Valley Poetry and won the Michael Marks Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet in 2017. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester and lives in West Yorkshire. Her collection, Accessioning, came out this year with The Emma Press.
