Vocal Inventiuon - Ross Sutherland / George Szirte

Contact: www.voiceproject.co.uk

Vocal Invention 2016
Norfolk & Norwich ‘Festival within the Festival’

An evening of poetry and spoken word to round off Vocal Invention.

Vocal Invention is a packed weekend of vocal adventures, celebrating the creativity and inventiveness of the human voice, poets, singers, improvisers, composers, talkers and thinkers come together for performances, workshops, talks and surprise pop-up performances in the city curated by the ever – creative Voice Project. From exquisite song to experimental vocal installations, 8-part harmony and digital poetry, the weekend is a chance to see and take part in a huge range of vocal events.Featuring the Voice Project Choir, Helen Chadwick, Ross Sutherland, The Neutrinos, George Szirtes, Birds of Hell, Stephen Watts, Dan Richards, Harmonium, Mouthful, Neil Paris and Sianed Jones.

Ross Sutherland has four poetry collections pub-lished by Penned in the Margins, including Twelve Nudes and Emergency Window. His theatre show, Stand by For Tape Back Up, was nominated for the 2015 Art Foundation Award for Spoken Word. The ÿlm adaptation was nominated for Best Documentary at the Edinburgh Film Festival, and won the Audience Prize at Fantastic Fest in Austin. His storytelling podcast, Imaginary Advice, is released monthly on iTunes.

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born British poet, writing in English, as well as a translator from the Hungarian language into English. He has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life. Born in Budapest on 29 November 1948, Szirtes came to England as a refugee in 1956 aged 8. He was brought up in London and studied Fine Art in London and Leeds. at Leeds was the ?His poems began appearing in national magazines in 1973 and his first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize the following year. He has won a variety of prizes for his work, most recently the 2004 T. S. Eliot Prize, for his collection Reel and the Bess Hokin Prize for poems in Poetry magazine, 2008. His translations from Hungarian poetry, fiction and drama have also won numerous awards. George’s specially written poems have featured in numerous Voice Project performances, set to music by Jon Baker and Karen Wimhurst.

Stephen Watts was born in London in 1952: his father’s family came from Stoke-on-Trent, his mother’s from the Swiss-Italian Alps and he has cultural roots there and in Scotland. In the early 70’s he lived on North Uist working as a shepherd and since 1976 has been in Whitechapel in the East End of London. He has read at international literary festivals, worked extensively as a writer in schools and hospitals and communities, and currently works independently as a poet, translator, editor and bibliographer. Stephen performed with The Voice Project as part of Ideas of Flight with his extraordinary poem The Birds of East London.

Esther Morgan was born in Kidderminster , Worcestershire in 1970. Since completing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in the 90s, she has published three collections of poetry, all with Bloodaxe. Her first, ‘Beyond Calling Distance’ (2001) won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her most recent book, ‘Grace’, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize. She taught creative writing at UEA where she also edited the contemporary poetry anthology ‘Reactions’. For several years she was Historic Recordings Manager for The Poetry Archive and in 2015 co-edited the Spring edition of Poetry Review with Moniza Alvi.

Entry: £8.00 : £6.00 concession

Time: 7:30pm