Next Buzzwords Sunday, December 2nd

Next Buzzwords Sunday, December 2nd

7pm - workshop led by Ann Drysdale
8pm - open mic and guest readings
Guest Poet:Ann Drysdale

Upstairs at The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham

Waged £5, unwaged £3

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 the highest terrace of 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 as well as writing a gonzo guidebook to the city of Newport as part of the “Real Wales” series from Seren.

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 (last!) holder of the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance.

Her first five poetry collections, Between Dryden and Duffy, The Turn of the Cucumber, Gay Science, Backwork and Quaintness and Other Offences have been joined by Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots (which is dedicated to loyal listeners at Buzzwords). All of these are rolling round in the collective memory of the Muse and a seventh collection is in progress and accreting nicely.