Poetry Reading by Pia Tafdrup and Peter Robinson
6 pm Wednesday 15 February HumSS 127
Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading
Admission is FREE. All are WELCOME. There will be REFRESHMENTS.
As part of her Walking over the Water Tour, which includes events in Oxford and at Ledbury, the award-winning Danish poet Pia Tafdrup will be reading for us in the Department of English Literature’s creative writing programme for 2016-17.
Pia Tafdrup (www.tafdrup.com) was born in Copenhagen in 1952. She is a member of the Danish Academy, and has published 17 collections of poetry, two novels, and two plays. Pia received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 1999 and the Nordic Prize in 2006 from The Swedish Academy. Her most recent poetry collections translated into English are Queen’s Gate (Bloodaxe, 2001), Tarkovsky’s Horses & Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2010) and Salamander Sun & Other Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015). Her latest books published in Denmark are entitled The Taste of Steel and The Smell of Snow.
Pia has also published a statement of her poetics entitled Walking over the Water (1991), and edited two poetry anthologies. She has produced literary translations of a number of Swedish writers, including Tua Forsström and Katarina Frostenson, and her own poems have been translated into more than 30 languages in books, anthologies and magazines. English translations of her poems have been published in 60 literary journals in the U.K., U.S., Canada, and Australia.
Pia was the subject of a 2003 documentary film about her work, Thousandborn, directed by Cæcilia Holbek Trier, and she has read from her work in more than 40 countries. She represented Denmark at Poetry Parnassus, the festival of readings, performance and debate that took place during the London 2012 Festival. Her poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books in this country, and there will copies of her work available for sale.
In support, Peter Robinson will be reading from his newly published Collected Poems 1976-2016 with the aim of sustaining the European dimension of this event.
Peter Robinson was born in Salford, Lancashire, in 1953. He has published aphorisms, short stories, a novel, literary criticism, as well as a number of volumes of poetry and translations for which he has received the Cheltenham Prize (1988), the John Florio Prize (2008), and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations (2002 and 2012). He is Professor of English and American Literature at Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press.
