St Mungo's Mirrorball: Poetry Showcase 5

An excellent evening of poetry in store with three wonderful poets.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965 and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published four books with Picador: The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (which was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award and a Forward Prize in 1998); The Ice Age (winner of the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Prize, and a Poetry Book Society Choice); and Tramp in Flames, which was short-listed for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2007 and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2009 he received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Travelling Scholarship from the Society of Authors. As a broadcaster he has written and presented many arts, feature and documentary programmes for BBC radio and television, including Radio 4’s The Echo Chamber. His most recent collection is The Dark Film, which was a Poetry Book Society Choice in 2012, and in 2013 he was awarded a Cholmondeley Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and his Selected Poems appeared in 2014.

Brian Johnstone is a poet whose work has appeared throughout Scotland, in the UK, America and internationally. He has published six collections, most recently The Book of Belongings (2009) and Dry Stone Work (2014), both Arc Publications. His poems have been translated into over ten languages; in 2009 Terra Incognita, a chapbook in Italian translation, was published by L’Officina (Vicenza). In 2014 his work will appear on The Poetry Archive website. A founder and former Director of StAnza: Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, he has appeared at numerous international poetry festivals, from Macedonia to Nicaragua, and venues across the UK.

JL Williams was born in New Jersey and studied at Wellesley College and on the MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. In September 2009 she journeyed to the Aeolian Isles to write a collection inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Condition of Fire (Shearsman Books, 2011). Her second collection, Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), explores the idea of home and where we come from. JL Williams performs in the band Opul and is Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry Library.