We are holding a fundraising poetry evening on Thursday 26th January.
This is an excellent opportunity to see and hear guest poets, Annie Freud, Donall Dempsey and Janice Dempsey and also to hear Sue read from her collection, Splitting Sunlight.
We shall open the doors at 6.30pm for a 7pm start. We shall be serving tea, coffee and canapés. (included in £5 entrance fee)
BYO wine if you would like to. We don’t have a license to serve alcohol. Soft drinks can be purchased though. There will also be an open mic and audience members are welcome to read one or two poems of their own, or a favourite if preferred.
Proceeds and donations on the night will go to our late son Mark’s fund for Cancer Research UK. Mark began this fund from his hospital bed and raised over £100,000. The fund is still going strong and is now at just over £328,000. Mark died on January 19th , 2017 from malignant melanoma (skin cancer) that had spread throughout his body.
A little bit about our special guests:
Annie Freud
Annie Freud is a poet, painter, editor and tutor in poetry composition. The Best Man that Ever Was, her debut collection published by Picador (2007), was awarded the Dimplex Prize for New Writing. The Mirabelles (2010) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize followed by The Remains appeared in 2015. Her most recent collection, Hiddensee was published in January 2021. She is renowned for her live performances.
Annie lives in Dorset.
Dònall Dempsey
Dònall has four collections in print and is a superb performer. His poems are both moving and at time humorous. He as four collections in print.
“Dónall is a poet as bard who reminds us of the pleasures of the imagination; who invites us to look up from the white noise of our busy lives. The poems tell of an individual who could not help but follow his own path which may not be the life others respect or even understand but where the rewards are richer and less material. Here is a man who does not live a life of quiet desperation but follows his calling with its rewards and pitfalls and is a happier man for it.” – Fiona Sinclair (London Grip)
Janice Dempsey
Janice trained as a fine artist at the Central School of Art in London (UK) and earned a living for over thirty years as an art teacher in secondary schools, with a break of 9 years in the 1980’s when I went abroad to Brunei and Bangladesh with my husband, then became a mother. When she retired from teaching, she continued to paint and also became interested in writing poetry Meeting Dónall, the poet and spoken word performer whom I later married, changed her life. We are a strong partnership, publishing poetry pamphlets and collections and hosting monthly spoken word events and book launches, online since the pandemic began in 2019. Their publishing website is dempseyandwindle.com.