Ted Hughes Birthday Weekend Poetry Reading at the Dusty Miller

To mark Ted Hughes’s birthday on 17 August, four dynamic Northern poets will gather in his native Mytholmroyd to celebrate the landscape and poetry of the former Poet Laureate.

Located in the North of England, each of the four readers’ work responds to landscapes that echo the Calder Valley and Ted Hughes’s framing of it as Elmet in Remains of Elmet and other collections.

Tom Branfoot is Poet in Residence at Manchester Cathedral and has recently been nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written with his long poem “A Parliament of Jets”. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022, and he organises the More Song poetry reading series in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books) and his debut collection Volatile is forthcoming next year with the 87press.

Becca Drake is a poet, educator, and printer based in York. They have a PhD in English and Icelandic late-medieval poetry, and her/their academic research explores lived landscapes of the medieval sea, the blue humanities, and medieval poetry as a tool for exploring affective relationships with landscapes of contemporary water crisis. Becca edits and prints experimental letterpress poetry pamphlets under the name Little Hirundine and their collection Unstill Landscapes was recently published by Guillemot.

Antony Rowland is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published four poetry collections: The Land of Green Ginger (Salt, 2008), I Am a Magenta Stick (Salt, 2012), M (Arc, 2017) and Caldebroc (Arc, 2023). He was awarded the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2012 and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2000.

David Mullin is an Elmet Trust volunteer and an archaeologist as well as a writer. He recently completed a residency focused on the poetry of archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes at the University of Bradford, and has work published in Apocalyptic Landscape: Poems from the Expressionist Poetry Workshop, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Where Meadows, The Prose Poem and Channel Magazine.

This event in the Poetry and Community programme, and part of a weekend of events celebrating the Crow poet’s birthday, is free, but any donations will be contributing to the Elmet Trust, which celebrates the life and work of  Ted Hughes and looks after his birthplace at 1 Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd, near Hebden Bridge.