Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Sheffield, Presents: Three Book launches

Nancy Gaffield is an Emeritus Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2014, she completed a libretto for the opera, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014) for the composer Nicola Lefanu which premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival before touring nationally. Other publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), Meridian (Longbarrow 2019), and Wealden (Longbarrow 2021), a collaborative work of poems and music performed by The Drift. Her poems have appeared in leading journals and anthologies including The Forward Anthology, the Times Literary Supplement, Tears in the Fence, The Long Poem Magazine, Blackbox Manifold, Golden Handcuffs Review and Angel Exhaust (forthcoming). Destiny Manifest, published by Shearsman in 2026, is her sixth collection.

 

Ansgar Allen is the author of books including a short history of Cynicism, and the novels, Black Vellum, Plague Theatre, The Wake and the Manuscript and The Sick List. His fictions foreground "uncertainty, digression, fragmentation, and the impossibility of closure... His texts sidestep the expectation that philosophical discourse be coherent, linear, or authoritative. Instead, they teach through artful disintegration, ambiguous gestures, and the construction of ruin." He is editor-in-chief at Erratum Press, and co-founded Risking Education, an imprint of Punctum Books.

 

Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at Sheffield. He is the co-editor of the international contemporary poetry journal Blackbox Manifold with Alex Houen. He is author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett; Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945, and The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam. He edited the special issue of Translation and Literature on “Modernism and Translation”, The Salt Companion to Peter Robinson with Katy Price (2007) and The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature with Mark Rawlinson (2012). His poetry collections are: nights as dreaming (Constitutional Information / earthbound press), CCCLXV with Crater Press (October 2025), and Lies Blurring Here with Broken Sleep (2026). He is the co-translator, with Ágnes Lehóczky, of The Song of the Cosmos: Selected Poems of Attila József (Shearsman Books, 2026). He is currently co-editing an edition of Australian poet Catherine Vidler’s work with Amelia Dale and A.J. Carruthers for Puncher & Wattman.

 

Born in Cornwall in 1947, Paul Rossiter has lived in Tokyo since 1981; he is Professor Emeritus in Language and Information Sciences at the University of Tokyo. After he retired from teaching in 2012, he founded Isobar Press to publish English-language poetry from Japan, both by English native-speaker poets with a strong connection to Japan and by Japanese poets who choose to write in English, together with English translations of modernist or contemporary Japanese poetry. The press has so far published fifty-six titles by thirty-five authors or translators. His poems have appeared in Tears in the Fence , Shearsman , Poetry Salzburg Review , Tokyo Poetry Journal , World Haiku , Golden Handcuffs Review , NOON: journal of the short poem , PN Review , Molly Bloom , and Otoliths . He has published ten volumes of poetry with Isobar, ranging from From the Japanese (2013) to The Pleasures of Peace (2021); his latest publication is his collected poems, Passages: Poems 1969–2019 (2024).

 

Note, this is an in person event but you can log on before 6.30 on:

 

Event curated by ágnes lehoczky & CP&P, sheffield.