Online Launch Reading: Alan Payne and Shash Trevett

Join us for an amazing evening of poetry will two highly talented and respected poets. Hosted by Poetry Business co-directors Ann and Peter Sansom.

Shash Trevett's books: https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product-...
Alan Payne's books: https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/product-...
PB Bookshop: https://poetrybusiness.co.uk/bookshop/
FREE SHIPPING on Alan Payne and Shash Trevett books, plus North 70, use code 'alan+shash' on our website.

Alan Payne was born in Point-à-Pierre, in the south of Trinidad; and has childhood memories of Grenada, Trinidad and Guyana. He came to England when he was nine, crossing the Atlantic on a French liner and arriving in Plymouth. After studying English at Durham University, he taught in secondary schools in Leicestershire; then moved to Sheffield, doing various jobs before returning to teaching. For twenty years, he taught in an infant school, where he shared his enthusiasm for poetry, story-telling and drama with the children. Since retiring he has visited the Caribbean with his wife – but now feels that Yorkshire is his home. In 2003 Alan won second place in the Hilda Cotterill Poetry Prize. He has had poems published in The North, Smiths Knoll and Scintilla; and in a variety of anthologies including Writing on Air (A BBC Anthology), The Sheffield Anthology: Poems from the City Imagined, The Animal Gaze: 14 line poems by 14 Sheffield poets and the art that inspired them, and Cast: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets. A few of his poems appear in WRITE Where We Are NOW, an on-line collection of poems written in the early period of the coronavirus pandemic, curated by Carol Ann Duffy and the Manchester Writing School. His pamphlet, Exploring the Orinoco, was a winner in the 2009/10 Poetry Business Competition. Mahogany Eve is his first full-length collection.

An exotic and ambitious collection in which deceptively simple structures are built to carry an impressive weight of interest and reference. – Andrew Motion, on Mahogany Eve

Shash Trevett is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies (including POETRY, Poetry London, Modern Poetry in Translation, Ambit and The North), she has read widely across the U.K and internationally and is a winner of a Northern Writers’ Award. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in May 2021 by Smith|Doorstop. Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas (Bloodaxe 2023, Penguin India 2023) which she co-edited with Vidyan Ravinthiran and Seni Seneviratne, was a Poetry Book Society Special Recommendation and one of the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2023. Shash has collaborated with artists and musicians and has been a mentor for New Writing North and the National Centre for Writing. She is a member of the Kinara Poetry Collective, a Ledbury Critic and a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation. The Naming of Names (Smith|Doorstop, 2024) is her first full collection.

My heart was in my mouth and the hair raised on my head while reading Shash Trevett’s The Naming of Names. Poetic language’s rare and obvious beauties appear in abundance, blue lotus flowering; but this was not the only reason why. The great lists of names in this book are part of its astounding poetic and globally significant achievement. Sometimes they monumentalise the page almost concretely, like inscriptions on a European war memorial or an Indian Ashoka pillar. Sometimes they rise like the smoke of incense at a holy rite, redolent of wisdom and praise; sometimes like the compound odour of war overlaying the perfumes of nature in Sri Lanka. - Anthony Vahni Capildeo, on The Naming of Names