Hay Festival Book Club – Selected Poems

Gillian Clarke talks to Jane Clarke

 – Free Online

National Poet of Wales, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award, Clarke is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today. Join the writer in conversation with writer and critic Jane Clarke as she revisits Selected Poems, her past collection gathering some of her best work in a single volume.

Submit your questions in advance of the event by emailing bookclub@hayfestival.org.

Further reading

Gillian Clarke 'stunned' at winning Queen's gold medal for poetry, The Guardian
The Birds and the Butterflies: An interview with poet Gillian Clarke, Varsity

About the author

Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff and lives in Ceredigion. Her work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for over thirty years, and she performs her poetry regularly for student audiences at Poetry Live, and in several European cities. Awarded the Queen’s Gold medal for Poetry in 2010, the Wilfred Owen Award in 2012. Prose works include a writer’s journal, At the Source. She has written radio and theatre drama, and translated poetry and prose from Welsh. The Gathering/Yr Helfa, commissioned by the National Theatre of Wales, was performed on Snowdon in September, 2014. Picador published her Selected Poems in 2016. Her tenth collection of poems, Zoology, was published by Carcanet in 2017. Her version of the book-long 7th century Welsh poem, Y Gododdin, is to be published by Faber in 2019.

About Hay Festival Book Club

Timeless titles to offer you a break from the day to day. Can't decide what to read next? Follow your curiosity and join Hay Festival on a journey to imagine the world anew through great literature. Unconstrained by genre or form these are our monthly picks of great books worth reading (or re-reading) right now.

Throughout the month, we'll share interesting links and articles relating to our selection on social media using #HFBookClub and invite you all to get involved with your questions and comments. Each selection will also be marked with a free online event.

If you'd like to recommend a book for consideration, get in touch via bookclub@hayfestival.org.

Happy reading!

Hay Festival Book Club – Selected Poems
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Selected Poems

Selected Poems gathers together the best of Gillian Clarke's poetry in a single volume. National Poet of Wales, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award, Clarke is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today, as well as one of the most popular poets on the school curriculum. Over the past four decades her work has examined nature, womanhood, art, music, Welsh history - and always with the lyric and imagistic precision by which her poetry is instantly recognisable. But perhaps her greatest inspiration is the Welsh landscape and all the human stories that it hosts: as UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has said, 'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths'. Selected Poems shows the great compass and interdependence of those two domains, and presents the finest work from one of the most important figures in poetry today.
Price: £10.99