Next Buzzwords - Sunday, April 3rd
Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham
Guest poet: Pat Borthwick
7pm: Workshop led by Pat Borthwick
8pm: Readings and open mic
£5, £3 unwaged
Pat Borthwick has published three full length poetry collections (with Littlewood Arc, Mudfog and Templar) and several pamphlets. She has won many poetry prizes including the Templar pamphlet prize in 2007 and has had her work translated into Spanish and Italian. In the last few months she was shortlisted for the Keats Shelley award and two of her poems were published in Mslexia as runners up in their poetry competition.
She is known for her sparkling readings and workshops and Billy Collins describes her work as being ‘The real business’. Simon Armitage says that ‘her poems are like maps with which you can truly find your way.’
Pat is a founder member and former chair of NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) and is one of the Poetry Society’s delegated Poets in Schools.
Her residencies have included a canal, a coalmine, Northern allotments, the Yorkshire Wolds and, for a new AONB (area of outstanding natural beauty), the Howardian Hills. In 2008 she was commissioned by the Festival of London and the Japanese Foundation to work with Japanese and English contemporary composers and produce a libretto for performers and an orchestra made up of half western and half eastern instruments.
Last year she co-ordinated the web based GPS project in East Yorkshire and more recently became the Poetry Society’s Stanza representative for rural Yorkshire.
She received an International Writers Hawthornden Award in 2003 and is currently Writer in Residence for RSPB Bempton Cliffs and poetry tutor for the Open College of the Arts.
