Poets Helen Mort and Alan Buckley explore our bodies and how we live through them. With poems about the prejudices faced by female rock climbers, the male gaze, our complex relationship with physical beauty, and the mystery of fire-eating, this event aims to give the body its own true voice.

Mort’s first collection, Division Street, was shortlisted for the Costa and T S Eliot prizes and won the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. She is the Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds and has a PhD from the University of Sheffield.

Buckley‘s pamphlet, Shiver, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. A second pamphlet, The Long Haul, is forthcoming. He works in Oxford as a psychotherapist, and as a school writer-in-residence for the charity First Story.

This event will be chaired by Dr Andrea Macrae, a senior lecturer in stylistics at Oxford Brookes University Department of English and Modern Languages.

Presented by Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre, Department of English and Modern Languages.