Life without Air, Daisy Lafarge’s T S Eliot shortlisted debut, is a compassionate and ecologically nuanced collection that finds a fresh way to explore humankind’s role in environmental chaos.
Emma Must’s The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday centres around a protest against a motorway extension in 1992 through Twyford Down, exploring the ways in which language reaches, saves, or fails to convince us.
In Selina Nwulu’s A Little Resurrection reflections on being and blackness are informed by empathy and intellectual curiosity, melding the golden light of Senegal with the harsh winds of Yorkshire.
Duration 1 hour
Supported by The River Mill Writing Retreat
Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021; Riverhead 2022), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and awarded Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. Her reviews and essays on ecology, art and literature have been widely published, appearing in Granta, LitHub, Wellcome Collection Stories, The White Review and elsewhere. In 2021 she completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow; her thesis focussed on intimacy and infection. The resulting book, Lovebug, will be published in 2023. Daisy is currently working on her second novel.
Emma Must is a poet living in Belfast. Formerly a full-time environmental campaigner, in 2021 she completed a PhD in English (Creative Writing) at Queen’s University Belfast, focusing on ecopoetry and ecocriticism. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Ballad of Yellow Wednesday, was published by Valley Press in December 2022. Her poem ‘Toll’ won the Environmental Defenders Prize in the 2019 Ginkgo Prize for Ecopoetry; her debut poetry pamphlet, Notes on the Use of the Austrian Scythe (2015), won the Templar Portfolio Award. In 1995 she was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for Europe, for her efforts towards land protection.
Selina Nwulu is a poet and essayist. Her work has been widely published in a number of journals, short films and anthologies, including the critically acclaimed New Daughters of Africa. Her first chapbook collection, The Secrets I Let Slip, was published in 2015 by Burning Eye Books and is a Poetry Book Society recommendation. She has performed internationally, and her work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, German and Polish, as well as exhibited on the Warsaw metro and in New York. She was Young Poet Laureate for London 2015-6, an award that showcases literary talent across the capital, and shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize 2019. She is also a 2021 Arts Award Finalist for Environmental Writing. Her debut full length collection, A Little Resurrection, also a Poetry Book Society recommendation, was published with Bloomsbury in 2022 and is an Irish Times book of the year.
