Newcastle Poetry Festival | Deryn Rees-Jones and Denise Riley

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Reading and In Conversation Deryn Rees-Jones and Denise Riley. Part of Newcastle Poetry Festival.

Denise Riley
Denise Riley is a critically acclaimed writer of both philosophy and poetry and has been praised as ‘one of the great poets of our time’. She is currently Professor of the History of Ideas and of Poetry at UEA. She has taught philosophy, art history, poetics, and creative writing. She is the author of the award-winning poetry collections, Say Something Back and Lurex.

Her latest book, A Chorus of Ears, is a series of essays on voice, lyric and the persona of the poet. Originally delivered as a lecture series at Trinity College, Cambridge, A Chorus of Ears meditates upon the emphasis we place upon the persona of the poet, relegating their actual poetry to a second-order importance.
What, Riley asks, might be discovered about the purpose of poetry, its originary point within our language and more yet besides, when we liberate it from the persona of the author? In allowing the poem to speak, what might we hear?

‘One of the most eloquent thinkers about our life in language’ – The Sunday Times

Deryn Rees-Jones
Deryn Rees-Jones is Professor of English at Liverpool University and the editor of Pavilion Poetry, Liverpool University Press. Her poetry collections Burying the Wren and Erato were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of Paula Rego: The Art of Story (Thames & Hudson 2019) and the lyric essay Fires (Shoestring, 2019).

Her remarkable latest collection Hôtel Amour, shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2026, sees Deryn Rees-Jones returning to ongoing preoccupations: the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body, and poetry’s place in a hostile world. Playful, and moving by turn, Hôtel Amour experiments with fragmented narrative and poetic form creating a breathing space for a multilayered and powerful meditation on illness, love and time.

‘Extraordinary in its formal conception and emotional accuracy’ – The Telegraph

Saturday 27th June | 2pm -3.30pm

Reading and In Conversation
TICKETS £6/£3 (students)

Online Bookings Only.
(Café open from 1.30pm)