Poetry Extra: National Poetry Day 2016

In a special edition, Radio 4 Extra’s Poet in Residence Daljit Nagra hosts a celebration of National Poetry Day 2016 (October 6 2016).

With him to discuss this year’s theme of Messages, plus poems and poets that have influenced them, are Sarah Howe, Maura Dooley and Denise Riley.

Guests will also read from their own work and there will be riches from the BBC poetry archive.

Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London.

Maura Dooley was a Centre Director at the Arvon Foundation and founded and directed the Literature programme at the South Bank Centre. She has been a judge for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Competition and the London Arts' New London Writers Awards. She has also chaired the Poetry Book Society. She is currently Reader in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. Her visiting positions have included A.D. White Professor at Cornell University in the US, Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery in London, and Visiting Fellow at Birkbeck College in the University of London. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing.

Poetry Extra is a weekly programme (Sundays at 5pm) on Radio 4 Extra hosted by Radio 4 and 4 Extra’s Poet in Residence Daljit Nagra.

Daljit is the son of Sikh immigrants from India who came to Britain in the late 1950s. His father worked in a concrete factory and his mother worked in a hospital laundry before they bought a shop in Sheffield in the early 1980s. He studied at the local comprehensive where he grew up with little awareness of poetry. When he was 19, he came across a book of William Blake’s poetry in a bookshop and says he has never stopped reading poetry since. He now lives in Harrow with his wife and two daughters and teaches Creative Writing at Brunel University. He has a BA and MA in English from Royal Holloway College.

Publicity contact: RH