Join us for the launch of two New Walk Editions pamphlets:
Ghalib, A Diary, by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
The West Pier, by Hugo Williams
Readings will be followed by an audience-led Q&A.
Registration is £2, and can be redeemed on 10 May against the cost of any of our pamphlets. The new pamphlets will go on sale on 10 May.
ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA lives in Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He is the author of seven books of poetry and two collections of essays, and has also done a lot of translation work. His Selected Poems and Translations was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry, and his Collected Poems (not including Ghalib, A Diary) was published by Shearsman this year.
Ghalib has been called ‘one of the most subtle and complex minds of the Indian nineteenth century’. In Dastanbūy (Nosegay), written in 1857 and 1858, he reflects on the events of the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Ghalib, A Diary draws on an English translation of the original Persian and also, formally, on Basil Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama. The result is a narrative immediate in its telling, and at once particular and universal in its predicaments.
HUGO WILLIAMS was born in 1942 and grew up in Sussex. He worked on the London Magazine from 1961 to 1970, and since then has earned his living as a journalist and travel writer. Billy’s Rain won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1999. His Collected Poems was published in 2002. In 2004 he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
The West Pier is a lyrical sketchbook of the poet’s life so far. A teenage brush with Swinging London in the company of Guinness heir Tara Browne, who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles’ ‘Day in the Life’ is the traumatic transition to adult life and marriage in pre-gentrified Islington, one time haunt of his hero Sir Walter Raleigh. The sequence is shaped and shadowed by the ‘leaving faces’ of friends and the heinous arson of Brighton’s West Pier, where he played as a child and went on early dates.
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