The Forward Prizes for Poetry invite all to enjoy readings from the shortlisted books in our new Meet the Poet series, starting on Tuesday June 30th at 7pm with Ella Frears' debut collection Shine, Darling.

Ticket buyers will be given the chance to submit questions in advance and each session will be moderated by a Forward Prizes judge, starting with Leaf Arbuthnot.

These 45 min sessions are inspired by Jeremy Paxman, who judged the Forwards in 2014 and called half-jokingly for a “Poetry Inquisition” so the public could "ask poets to explain why they chose to write about the particular subject they wrote about, and why they chose the particular form and language, idiom, the rest of it".

Thanks to the pandemic, he’s finally got his way and those who are prevented by circumstances from attending live poetry events this year will have the chance to join the conversation.

Any queries? Get in touch.

Ella Frears - shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection - has been poet-in-residence on the number 17 bus in Southampton, at Tate St. Ives, and in a university physics department, among others. She has written extensively about motorway service stations and her poem 'Fucking in Cornwall' was highly commended in the 2019 National Poetry Competition.

A startling range of subject-matters find coherence in Frears’ idiosyncratic voice, sense of humour, and strange connection-making. Poetic form, for Frears, is unstable and shifty, a way of drawing different registers of language into unexpected collisions. The heart of Shine, Darling is the unsettling long piece detailing an autobiographical near-abduction experience, ‘Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity’, where interwoven voices and shifting time-frames build up like evidence.

‘I wanted to write a long-form lyric poem the length and weight of a short story, with the suspense of a novel’, she says.

Leaf Arbuthnot - Forward Prizes judge 2020 - is a freelance journalist and poetry critic whose reviews have been published in the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Ambit and elsewhere. She judged the 2017 Michael Marks Awards for poetry pamphlets. Her first novel, Looking for Eliza, was published by Orion in May, and is about a cranky poet’s unlikely friendship with a young woman in Oxford.