Words on Tap Presents… Paul Farley

Open Mic Event

Contact: wordsontap@email.com

After two years, not-for-profit literary event Words on Tap will cease operating. To celebrate we have one last showcase evening planned, headlined by multi-award-winning poet and BBC broadcaster Paul Farley who will read from his selected works in the intimate setting of The Chemic Tavern’s function room.

Tickets are £6 (and are very limited) and can be acquired by emailing wordsontap@email.com. This is a unique opportunity to see and hear one of the nation’s finest poets reading his work at an informal venue. Those interested in a support slot will have their ticket stubs entered into a prize draw from which five poets will be selected to read on the night. More info below.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published four books with Picador: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award and a Forward Prize in 1998); The Ice Age (winner of the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Prize, and a Poetry Book Society Choice); and Tramp in Flames, which was short-listed for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007 and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2009 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors.

He has also written a book on Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (British Film Institute, 2006) and in 2007 edited a selection of John Clare for Faber’s Poet-to-Poet series. As a broadcaster he has written and presented many arts, feature and documentary programmes for BBC radio and television, including Radio 4’s The Echo Chamber, Sunday Features on Wilfred Owen and W.H. Auden, two Archive Hours on Philip Larkin, poetry features on John Clare, Frank O’Hara and Michael Drayton, and several original radio dramas and adaptations. His poems for radio are collected in Field Recordings: BBC Poems 1998-2008 (Donut Press, 2009) and a selected poems, The Atlantic Tunnel, was published in the US by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2010. He has also written more widely on the arts and literature for The Guardian, Art Review, Granta, Tate etc, the Independent, the Observer and Poetry Review; he is a frequent guest on programmes such as Saturday Review, The Culture Show, Front Row, Night Waves and The Verb.

His book, Edgelands, a non-fiction journey into England’s overlooked wilderness (co-authored with Michael Symmons Roberts) was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011; it received the Royal Society of Literature’s Jerwood Award and was serialised as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His most recent collection is The Dark Film, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012, and in 2013 he was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and his Selected Poems appeared in 2014.

Price: £6.00

Time: 7:00pm