Ledbury Poetry Critics: Reviewing the Reviews
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-07-21

Inspired by the Ledbury Poetry Critics programme, this discussion explores poetry and what it means to review it, accompanied by readings from 4Brown Girls Who Write. 

Sarah Howe is a British poet and academic. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T S Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio. 

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, New Statesman and Granta. His second collection was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize and was a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. ;

Sandeep Parmar FRSL FRSA is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her books include Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern, an edition of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees (Carcanet, 2011), and two books of her own poetry. 

Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood in Jamaica. He currently serves as the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His most recent collection of poems is City of Bones: A Testament (2017).  

Paisley Rekdal is the author of The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text entitled Intimate; and six books of poetry. Her book, The Broken Country, won the 2016 AWP Nonfiction Prize, and her newest work of nonfiction, Appropriate: A Provocation, was published by W.W. Norton in 2021.

4Brown Girls Who Write is a collective whose radical polyphonic style showcases the daring of their individual writing. The authors are: Roshni Goyate, Sharan Hunjan, Sheena Patel and Sunnah Khan. Their acclaimed joint collection was published in 2020 by Rough Trade Books.