Nick Laird and Hannah Sullivan introduced by Lucy Thynne

Award-winning poets Nick Laird and Professor Hannah Sullivan read from their works including their latest collections Up Late and Was it for This.

Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and critic and winner of the Betty Trask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. His collection, Feel Free, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize and his latest, Up Late, won the Forward Prize for Best Poem. The poems in Up Late reflect on the strange and chaotic times in which we live. Laird confronts questions of aloneness, friendship, illness and death, and the push and pull of daily existence.

Sullivan is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. Her first collection of poems, Three Poems, won the T S Eliot Prize and the John Pollard Poetry Prize. Was it for This continues the themes of that first collection with an exploration of our attempts to map our lives in space and time. The collection includes poems about wider collective experience and historic events and disaster, including a poem about the Grenfell tragedy.

Here they are introduced by fellow poet Lucy Thynne, deputy literary editor of The Telegraph, who writes the Poem of the Week column.