Blackwell's Presents...

Blackwell's were delighted to be joined by Carcanet poets on the 7th of February for a wonderful evening of poetry and discussion with three of Carcanet's most prominent poets, Beverley Bie Brahic, Alison Brackenbury and Nina Bogin.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet, translator and occasional critic. Her collection White Sheets was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize; Hunting the Boar (2016) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and her translation, Guillaume Apollinaire, The Little Auto, won the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize. Other translations include Francis Ponge, Unfinished Ode to Mud, a 2009 Popescu Prize finalist, and books by Hélène Cixous, Yves Bonnefoy, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Brahic was born in Saskatoon, Canada, grew up in Vancouver, and now lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953 and studied at Oxford. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she works, as a director and manual worker, in the family metal finishing business. Her Carcanet collections include Dreams of Power (1981), Breaking Ground (1984), Christmas Roses (1988), Selected Poems (1991), 1829 (1995), After Beethoven (2000) and Bricks and Ballads (2004). Her poems have been included on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and 1829 was produced by Julian May for Radio 3. Her work recently won a Cholmondeley Award.

Nina Bogin, poet and translator, was born in New York City and has lived in France since 1976. Her previous collections are In the North, The Winter Orchards and The Lost Hare. In addition to numerous translations in the domain of art history, her translation of The Illiterate by Agota Kristof was published in 2013.

The evening will be chaired by Bernard O’Donoghue, Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, where he taught Medieval English and Modern Irish Poetry. He has published six collections of poetry, including Gunpowder, winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize for Poetry, and Farmers Cross (2011) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize as well as a verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006).

Music: Borrtex - Children's Joy.

On Saturday the 2nd of February, we were joined in the bookshop by Johann Hari and Nigel Warburton as part of the Philosophy in the Bookshop series.

Johann Hari - Lost Connections

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Lost-Connections-by-Johann-Hari-author/9781408878729

Nigel Warburton - Little History of Philosophy

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/A-Little-History-of-Philosophy-by-Nigel-Warburton/9780300187793

Music: Borrtex - Children's Joy.

On Wednesday the 16th of January, we were joined by Paul Luna as part of our 'For Learning, For Life' series taking place in the Norrington Room.

Typography, the art of designing printed words, touches our life now more than ever. The widespread use of mobile phones, tablets and social media means that we are regularly asked to make decisions about the fonts, sizes, and layouts we use in our writing. We now see typography as a way to express our personalities rather than just make our writing legible. Paul Luna offers a broad definition of typography as design for reading, whether in print or on screens, where a set of visual choices are taken to make a written message more accessible, more easily transmitted, more significant, or more attractive.

Paul Luna both researches and designs complex texts. He designed the last two editions of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and has written on the relationship between typography and lexicography, including a study of the typography of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary. Paul is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Reading and co-editor of the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication’s publication Typography Papers.