Poetry: Where Do Poems Come From? with Katharine Towers & Niall Campbell, Guest Jen Hadfield

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 11th Jul - Sat 16th Jul, 2022
All Day

Location
Moniack Mhor, Kiltarlity, Inverness-shire , IV4 7HT

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write. This above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: Must I write?” Are there poems you must write, that you’d like to go deeper, wilder or longer with? There might be a sequence or a story that you must tell. Katharine and Niall will share their writing experience and help you find strategies to write your truth and make it compelling to the reader. Using exercises and games, they’ll show how poems can arrive from reading other poems, looking at the natural world, art, myth or from playing with images and language.

Katharine Towers was born in London and lives in the Peak District. She has published three collections with Picador, the most recent being Oak (2021). Her first collection won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and her second was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. HappenStance Press published her pamphlet The Violin Forest in 2019. Her work has been read on Radios 3 and 4 and her poem ‘The Way We Go’ was a Poem on the Underground. Katharine was Poet–in–Residence at the Cloud Appreciation Society from 2016 – 2018. 

Niall Campbell is a poet originally from South Uist, one of the Western Isles. Moontide, his first collection, was named inaugural winner of The Edwin Morgan Poetry Award and Saltire First Book of the Year. Moontide was also shortlisted for The Forward and The Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prizes. His second collection, Noctuary, was published by Bloodaxe Books in Spring 2019.

Jen Hadfield lives in Shetland. Her first collection, Almanacs, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2003. Her second collection, Nigh-No-Place, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Competition in 2012. Her fourth collection The Stone Age, published by Picador in 2021, explores neurodiversity and recently won the prestigious Highland Book Prize 2021. She is also working on a collection of essays about Shetland, where she is building a house, very slowly.

If you want to attend a course with a family member, or someone within your extended household please do let us know and we can arrange use of our former twin rooms. These are available at £600 per person.

Bookings