Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 17th November 2022, featuring Antony Mair (poetry), Beth Miller (prose) and Frances Presley (poetry).
This will be a LIVE event at the John Harvey Tavern in Lewes (upstairs room): doors 6pm for a 6.30pm start.
Tickets £5 (£3 students/unwaged and claiming benefit) available on the door.
Books will be for sale on the night (cash only please).
Antony Mair
Antony Mair has just moved to Bexhill, but previously lived in Hastings, where he established the Hastings Stanza. Following an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster, where he gained a distinction, he has published three collections. Bestiary, and Other Animals, was shortlisted for the 2017 Live Canon First Collection Prize, and published by Live Canon in June 2018. Let The Wounded Speak, published by Oversteps Books in October 2018, and A Suitcase Filled with Hope, published by Live Canon in May 2021, were longlisted for the Poetry Book Awards 2020 and 2021 respectively. He was recently awarded first prize in the 2022 Live Canon International Poetry Competition. His work ranges over a wide variety of themes and forms, influenced by his family background, his identity as a gay man, and a career in international commercial law.
Beth Miller
Beth Miller is the author of six novels, including the bestselling The Missing Letters of Mrs Bright (2020). Her most recent novel, The Woman Who Came Back to Life (2022), will be published in seven languages. She has also published two non-fiction books: one about Shakespeare and the other about The Archers. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brighton University, and teaches creative writing at various places including for Arvon. She also works as a writing mentor and book coach.
Frances Presley
Frances Presley’s Collected Poems 1973-2020 were published this year, in two volumes, by Shearsman. As Harriet Tarlo writes ‘from her earliest poems, with their intense and tense engagement with her modernist forbears, Presley has maintained an uncompromising integrity and invention… her sense of place, the politics of landscape and her astute feminism remain constant’. She will also be reading from Black Fens Viral, which began when she was recovering from Covid and travelling on the slow train through East Anglia. This flat, agricultural, landscape of black peat was once marshland before the fens were drained. It extends to Lincolnshire, where she spent her childhood. ‘Viral’ refers both to Covid and to a text generator known as the Markov chain: its strange rearrangement of text resembles a viral assault. www.francespresley.co.uk
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