Haliwerfolc

Joanne Clement and I held the first ‘Haliwerfolc’ poetry event at Empty Shop in Durham last Wednesday evening. The night was well attended, with around 25 guests turning out to see readings from Lisa Matthews, Padraig Regan, Mandana M. Ghoyonloo, Paul Batchelor and myself and Jo.

We hope that this will be the first of many events in Durham and across the region, sitting in tandem with well-established nights such as Colpitts and readings organised by Durham University English students. Following on the back of Jo and Tracy Gillman’s ‘The Cold Boat: Poetry of Witness’ – itself a follow-up event to Carolyn Forché and Shami Chakrabarti’s recent human rights and poetry discussion at Newcastle University – we intend for Haliwerfolc to become a sustained conversation piece between literature, the North-East region and broader socio-political and environmental topics that we might widely label ‘internationalism’.

Watch this space for details of our next event, coming very soon...