The School of Cultural Studies and Humanities in conjunction with the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association was delighted to welcome Anne Caldwell.

Anne grew up in the north-west of England and now lives in West Yorkshire. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies – Poet’s Cheshire (Headland) and The Nerve (Virago) and in three collections by Cinnamon Press. She now teaches creative writing at Bolton University and for the OU. She performs all over the UK, and her first full length book of poetry, Talking with the Dead, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011. The National Association for Writers in Education (NAWE) employs Anne to run their professional development programme for writers. Her first collection has been described by Alison Brackenbury: ‘Anne Caldwell’s poems deal passionately with grief and birth, love – and lobsters. They are intensely alive, flighty as young animals; powerful and varied as the sea.’

She is currently working on two sequences of poems that use her father’s archive of photographs as starting points. They are also based on Anne’s walking and photographing the cities of Aberdeen and Berlin and link together a process of ekphrasis, sensory explorations of the current cityscapes and her own family history. Anne has been asked to showcase this work at ‘The United Kingdom Meets Berlin’, the eighth Annual Summer Festival of International Art this summer alongside leading UK artists of all disciplines. The festival takes place at the Emerson Gallery in Berlin and the theme is ‘re-imaging’. These photographs are in the gallery below to accompany the reading in the podcast.

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