An evening with Rose Ruane and Julian Stannard

  Sunday 21st April at 7pm UK time

This gathering has been archived here and free to watch:

 https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/NgY_PvM0tB6pwunWCWxfRpKKJS_k9SOHzQ4u4RlZ-X6lMM9bnVtcMpZ01Y8IEsBr.H0Ff2gM-12JNRD1A

Passcode: 9Z3=k$Y3

This month's free online gathering brings together two wonderful writers: the poet Julian Stannard and the novelist Rose Ruane, who will be reading from, and discussing, their latest books.

If you're not already on the guest list and would like to join in please leave your full name and email address in the comments section at the end of this blog.

Rose Ruane was originally a visual artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and video. Stories and language were always part of her art practice, but as the written word crept further and further into her art and gradually edged out making and performing, she had to admit that she had become a writer instead.

She undertook the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, and subsequently won the Off West End Adopt a Playwright award in 2015. She writes plays, makes podcasts, performs spoken word and occasionally still has a go at drawing and making things just to see if she still can.

She lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs.

Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published in 2021. Her latest, Birding, is published  by Little Brown the week after this programme is broadcast! You can pre-order here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/birding-rose-ruane/7402172?ean=9781472158000

Julian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.

‘Imagine 'Carry on Rilke', or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal reworked as an end of the pier pantomime, and you get something of the flavour of Stannard's brilliant new collection. The mysterious poems are darkly funny, and the funny poems are disconcertingly mysterious. I can think of no better companion to have at your side as civilisation's walls collapse and the world spins crazily from its axis.’ —Alan Bilton

Order from Salt here:

https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/please-don-t-bomb-the-ghost-of-my-brother-9781784633066

Join us, and keep the lights burning.

David