Sunday 6th November

Next Buzzwords, Sunday, 6th November
Upstairs at The Exmouth, Bath Road, Cheltenham

7pm - workshop
8pm - Guest readings and open mic

£5 waged, £3 unwaged

Guest poet - Ann Drysdale who will also run the workshop


All About Ann Drysdale. (Well, nearly…)

Ann was born near Manchester and brought up in London. She has lived in places as disparate as a narrowboat in the Midlands and a smallholding on the North York Moors where she learned stockmanship by experiment and brought up three children as a single parent. During this time she wrote one of the longest-running by-line columns in the provincial press. She now lives in a mining town in South Wales.

In 1988 she started a degree course in English Literature at York, but having left formal education in the sixties she had not realised that the language of critical theory had developed along entirely different lines from that of literature itself and her vocabulary proved inadequate. She was later awarded an MA in the teaching and practice of creative writing, has been a visiting lecturer at Cardiff University and spent eighteen months as writer-in-residence at UWE, Bristol. She has taught at all levels, from Arvon to special needs primary schools and collaborated with photographer Tim Collier on a book of poems celebrating the changing face of the South Wales valleys.

She is an accomplished and popular reader of her own and other people’s work, once reaching the final of the Cheltenham All-comers’ Slam. Her first volume was shortlisted at Aldeburgh in 1995. Individual poems have won prizes in the Manchester, Cardiff, Peterloo, Housman Society, Bridport and National poetry competitions and she is the current holder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance.

Her five poetry collections, Between Dryden and Duffy, The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science, Backwork and Quaintness and Other Offences are all rolling round in the collective consciousness of the Muse and, in the true tradition of the penurious troubadour, copies will doubtless be available on the night!