A Poetry Reading with Patrick Errington, Kris Johnson and John Challis

Join us this October for a thrilling evening with a trio of poets! We are lucky to be joined by the wonderful Patrick Errington, Kris Johnson and John Challis for a unique event celebrating contemporary poetry, with all three authors reading from their own works.

Published earlier this year, Patrick Errington's debut collection, the swailing, traces the brittle boundaries between presence and absence, keeping and killing, cruelty and tenderness. Urgent, resonant to the bone, the swailing burns to the ember-edge of grief, memory, and control to find the wildness, wilderness, and wonder that remain.

In Ghost River, Kris Johnson invites readers to stare down blue-mouthed crevasses, venture into old growth forests, and peer beneath the floorboards of ancestral homesteads. In this lyrical and intimate portrait of America's Pacific Northwest, wilderness and home are interwoven. Deep time is punctured by strip malls and freeways, wildfires and dams.

The living and the dead are working side by side in John Challis's dramatic debut collection, The Resurrectionists. Whether in London's veg and meat markets, far below the Dartford Crossing, or on the edge of the Western world, these poems journey into a buried and sometimes violent landscape to locate the traces of ourselves that remain. The veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest when a child is born, and something close to hope for the future is resurrected.

Patrick James Errington is a Scottish-Canadian poet, translator, and interdisciplinary researcher. His poems have won numerous awards, including the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Poetry International Prize. Originally from Alberta, Canada, Patrick now lives in Scotland where he’s a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, teaching and researching across fields like literature, creative writing, translation, and cognitive psychology.

Kris Johnson is the author of a pamphlet, Skinny Dip (Enchiridion, 2022), and a collection, Ghost River (Bloodaxe, 2023), longlisted for the 2023 Laurel Prize. In 2016, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is the recipient of a DYCP grant from Arts Council England and has published in journals, including The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London and Poetry Northwest.

John Challis' debut collection, The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe, 2021), was a poetry book of the month in the Guardian and highly commended in the 2021 Forward Prizes for Poetry. His pamphlets include The Black Cab (Poetry Salzburg, 2017), a 2019 New Writing North Read Regional Title, and Hallsong (New Writing North, 2022).He is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, a Pushcart Prize, and an Author’s Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors. He is an editor for Poetry Salzburg Review and teaches at York St John University.

Patrick Errington's photo credit Laura Meek 2023