News | Monday, 21st March 2022

University marks World Poetry Day

Readings, events and activities celebrate Manchester Metropolitan’s strength in creative writing

Malika Booker
Malika Booker has read An Alternative History of Stones for World Poetry Day

Manchester Metropolitan University is marking World Poetry Day - a worldwide celebration of creativity and linguistic diversity.

Acclaimed poets from the University’s Manchester Writing School are writing new work and sharing some of their best-known creations with staff, students and the wider public.

Manchester Poetry Library, hosted in the University’s stunning new Grosvenor East building, is also planning a range of events and activities to celebrate the day.

Malika Booker, poet and lecturer at Manchester Writing School, who won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2020, has recorded a reading of her poem An Alternative History of Stones from the collection Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika's Poetry Kitchen, published last year.

The collection shares new work from the writers of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, a collective formed in 2001 by Booker and fellow poet Roger Robinson “for writers outside of the establishment to grow, improve, discuss and learn”. The Kitchen has since amplified a “new generation of voices, launching some of the most exciting writers, books and initiatives in British poetry in the past twenty years”.

Elsewhere, writer and senior lecturer Anjum Malik has shared her first new work as part of her new role as one of Manchester’s first Multilingual City Poets – a group of three poets working with Manchester City of Literature who will create new cultural work that represents the city throughout 2022.Her ghazal poem This Here celebrates poetry in Manchester.

And Manchester Poetry Library will be marking World Poetry Day on their social media channels and in the Library itself throughout the day, culminating this evening in the event Why I No Longer Write Poems: Book Launch (7pm). This special event will launch a new translation of widely revered Georgian poet Diana Anphimiadi’s collection of the same name. Her work, that glides between classic allusions and surreal imagery, has been co-translated for a new edition by Manchester Metropolitan poet Professor Jean Sprackland.

Anyone can also drop into Manchester Poetry Library to check out Poetry on Vinyl, an exhibition by award-winning poet, novelist and musician Anthony Joseph of records to inaugurate the Library’s audio collection from early 20th century to present day.

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