For poets of all abilities, writing about someone important – a family member, friend, love interest – can be a royal road to generating a poem of real emotional impact. During this workshop, we’ll look at a range of highly effective structures for framing our feelings about people. From work to hobbies to anecdotes to important places, there are so many ways into writing about people, and the workshop will brim with as many ideas as it can fit. By the end, you should have something which says something important about someone important, which does the magic poems can, of making someone feel.
Where: Maison Internationale des Associations, rue des Savoises 15, 1205 Geneva.
Time: 10:30-16:30
10:30 - 13:00 Workshop | 14:00 - 16:30 Critiquing session
Jonathan Edwards’s first collection, My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 2014), received the Costa Poetry Award and the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award. It was shortlisted for the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection, Gen (Seren, 2018), also received the Wales Book of the Year People’s Choice Award, and in 2019 his poem about Newport Bridge was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He received the Troubadour Poetry Prize in 2022. He has been a judge for the National Poetry Competition and the Wales Book of the Year and a Literature Wales mentor of emerging writers, and has led courses and workshops for the Arvon Foundation, the Poetry School and the Poetry Society. He lives in Crosskeys, South Wales.