StAnza Poetry Festival in Scotland brings poetry in all its forms and many languages to Scottish audiences and worldwide. This year’s event includes both live and online readings for all to enjoy.
Gallery Press authors taking part in this year’s StAnza are Alan Gillis and Annemarie Ní Churreáin.
Between Digital, Imagined and Real Worlds —
Alan Gillis and Stephen Sexton
10.00 am
12 March 2022
Parliament Hall, 66 South Street, KY16 9QW St Andrews, Scotland
Tickets for live event
Tickets for online event
Stephen Sexton and Alan Gillis are two poets particularly interested in the relationship between poetry and digital reality. When Stephen was young, video games provided a means of escapism; his Forward-Prize-winning first collection If all the World and Love were Young takes readers on a journey through Super Mario World as a way of working through his grief at his mother’s death, while his more recent collection, Cheryl’s Destinies, finds comfort in fantastical dream-worlds and tarot cards. Fellow Northern Irish poet, and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh, Alan Gillis will extend Stephen’s themes in writing which explores the narrative thread of how reality has – slowly but surely – become replaced by the internet.
Erasures: What We Cannot Say and How We Say It —
Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Alice Hiller and Maria Stadnicka
2.00 pm
12 March 2022
The Byre Theatre – Auditorium, Abbey Street, KY16 9LA
Tickets for live event
Tickets for online event
This afternoon’s extended reading and discussion brings together three writers writing about emotive and difficult themes, and will explore the techniques and approaches each take to finding words for things that can’t easily be said. Through use of hand-erasure techniques in bird of winter, Alice Hiller discovers transient holding places for the darkness of being groomed and sexually abused in childhood. Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets is a poetic documentary exploring the lived experiences of children in care during the Romanian communist dictatorship which ended in 1989. Annemarie Ní Chuirrean will read from and speak about The Poison Glen, a collection at whose heart sits the story of the stolen or missing child, including work responding to a long-gone Foundling Hospital in Dublin and bearing witness to family loss and cultures of silence in Ireland. Books will be available on the day.
