Poetry for Our Time – Three poets explore what it is to be human at this moment in history.

Zaffar Kunial

Zaffar Kunial is a recipient of Yale University’s Windham- Campbell Prize. His first poetry collection Us appeared on a number of shortlists including the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His latest collection England’s Green was the Times poetry book of the year in 2022.

Pippa Little

Pippa Little is a Scots poet settled in Northumberland. Her third collection Time Begins to Hurt came out from Arc in 2022. Her earlier collections were shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Award and the Saltire Poetry Book of the Year Award. She is a Hawthornden Fellow, has been a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and is a poetry tutor for the Faber Academy.

James Bryne

James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist. His most recent poetry collections are Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) and Of Breaking Glass (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). Other books include The Caprices, a response to Francisco Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ (Arc, 2019), Everything Broken Up Dances (Tupelo, US, 2015) and White Coins (Arc Publications, UK, 2015). He was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012, Northern Illinois University Press, 2013) and he co-edited I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017), as well as Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21^st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009). He works as a Reader in Contemporary Literature at Edge Hill University. Byrne has given readings in Libya and Syria and his Selected Poems / Poemas Escogidos are published by Buenos Aires Poetry. With the author, he co-translated Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi (Five Scenes from a Failed Revolution, Arc 2022). Forrest Gander writes that Places you Leave is ‘restlessly energetic and politically insistent…these are knife-sharp glimpses of the world.’

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