Join Carcanet poets Sasha Dugdale and Caroline Bird in St Andrews and online across events at StAnza Poetry Festival on the 16th March.

Poetry Unbound Live with Sanah Ahsan and Sasha Dugdale
10:00-11:00, Byre Studio Theatre

Hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama, join Sanah Ahsan and Sasha Dugdale for this live podcast recording as they read and delve into their poems. This event will explore messy emotional and fraught political landscapes with characteristic compassion, grace and storytelling - Sasha will be reading from and discussing her latest collection, The Strongbox.

Online tickets are £5 here, and the in-person event is priced on a pay-what-you-can basis - tickets here.

Poetry Centre Stage: Caroline Bird and Imtiaz Dharker
18:30-20:15, Byre Auditorium

In celebration of Mirrorball'€™s 20th anniversary, we bring together two fan favourites from the long-running reading series: award-winning poets Caroline Bird and Imtiaz Dharker. Caroline Bird'€™s Ambush at Still Lake blends cinematic imagery with emotional depth, capturing the transformative power of love and our capacity for renewal. Imtiaz Dharker'€™s Shadow Reader offers hauntingly relevant poems that resonate with hope, exploring themes of war, displacement, and the search for belonging with grace and clarity. Together, these two poets will give you an evening of evocative poetry that beautifully encapsulates this year'€™s festival theme, "How We Feel"€™.

Delivered in partnership with St Mungo'€™s Mirrorball.

Online tickets are £5 here, and the in-person event is priced on a pay-what-you-can basis - tickets here.
 

Sasha Dugdale has published six collections with Carcanet. The Strongbox is her most recent book (May, 2024). Her fifth collection Deformations was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize and Derek Walcott Prize. Joy (2017) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and the title poem was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2016. Her recent translations for theatre include Bad Roads and The Grainstore by Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit, for production by the Royal Court Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. She has published numerous translations of Russian-language women’s writing. The most recent of these, Maria Stepanova’s novel In Memory of Memory (Fitzcarraldo, 2021), was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Weidenfeld Prize, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Dugdale won the MLA Lois Roth Award for this translation. A new collection by Maria Stepanova Holy Winter is forthcoming from Bloodaxe (UK) and New Directions (US) in 2023. She is former editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Caroline Bird has seven previous volumes published by Carcanet. Her sixth collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020 and was shortlisted for the Polari Prize and the Costa Prize. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 TS Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. A two-time winner of the Foyles Young Poets Award, her first collection Looking Through Letterboxes was published in 2002 when she was 15. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and was shortlisted for the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2001 and the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008 and 2010. She was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics.  In 2023, she won a Cholmondeley Award. Her Selected Poems, Rookie, was published in 2022.