THE LINE-UP
Friday 1st of December
7pm- Alexandra Ault & Laura Walker
in conversation with Chris McCabe- £10
8.30pm- Ishion Hutchinson- £10
St Mary’s Church, Woodstock
Saturday 2nd of December
3pm- Damian le Bas and Jo Clement- £10
5pm- Michael Stewart- £7
Woodstock Town Hall
6.30pm- MacGillivray & Steve Ely- £10
8pm- Backlisted with Neil Astley & MacGillivray- £10
St Mary’s Church, Woodstock
Sunday 3rd of December
3pm- Nancy Campbell, Jane Draycott & Donald Gardner- £10
5pm- Jamie McKendrick & Jennie Feldman- £10
Woodstock Town Hall
6.30pm- Open Mic with special guests Michael Bayley, Lucy Ingrams & Laura Theis- £5
7.50pm- Hooper:Henderson- £10
Woodstock Social Club
WEEKEND TICKET, giving entry to all events- £60
Children and students- half price on all tickets (incl. all-event weekend ticket)
You can purchase tickets in person at the shop, by phone, email or by visiting the Eventbrite page.
23 Oxford Street, Woodstock,
OX20 1TH
Monday–Saturday
10am–6pm
Sunday
11am-5pm
info@woodstockbookshop.co.uk
01993 812760
THE EVENTS
FRIDAY 1ST OF DECEMBER
ALEXANDRA AULT & LAURA WALKER IN CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS MCCABE
Poems in Progress: Drafts from Master Poets
7pm, St Mary Magdalen Church, Park Street,
Woodstock, OX20 1SJ
£10
Poems in Progress draws from the British Library’s vast collection of manuscripts, spanning nearly 350 years of rough drafts, false starts and near-miss revisions (‘I wandered like a lonely cloud’). Alexandra and Laura are each lead curators for the BL’s treasure trove of manuscripts and will be in conversation with Chris McCabe, poet, editor and Southbank National Poetry Library Head Librarian, to discuss the beauty and insight revealed by these extraordinary artefacts.
ISHION HUTCHINSON
School of Instructions
8.30pm, St Mary Magdalen Church, Park Street, Woodstock, OX20 1SJ
£10
ISHION HUTCHINSON was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections School of Instructions, House of Lords and Commons and Far District. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ishion will be reading from his keenly-awaited third collection, School of Instructions. The New Yorker has said of his work: “[His] lines listen to themselves, finding the next phrase, and then the next, implicit in what’s already been written down. His sound effects are exquisite: the clusters of consonants . . . and the vowels so open you could fall into them, the magisterial cresting syntax, the brilliant coupling of unlike words…”
This is a rare and very special visit to the UK from Ishion who usually resides in the US where he teaches at Cornell University.
SATURDAY 2ND OF DECEMBER
DAMIAN LE BAS & JO CLEMENT
The Stopping Places & Outlandish
3pm, Assembly Room, Woodstock Town Hall, Market Place, Woodstock, OX20 1SL
£10
DAMIAN LE BAS is a poet and author of The Stopping Places: a Journey through Gypsy Britain (Vintage, 2019), winner of the Somerset Maugham award, a Jerwood award, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman travel book of the year.
JO CLEMENT is a Northern Writers’ Award recipient. She edits Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine, lectures at Northumbria University and selects collections for the Poetry Book Society. Outlandish (Bloodaxe Books, 2022) was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize and longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize.
Damian and Jo will be reading from their work and discussing how their shared Romanichal background has shaped their writing, the challenges contemporary British Gypsy culture faces and how its rich history is inseparable from Britain’s as a whole.
“Beautifully written and deeply affecting… While this is a beautiful, important book about Gypsy culture, it’s also a moving exploration of what it means to belong” – Clover Stroud on The Stopping Places
“It is very rare to find a young poet with such an alert musical ear, able to listen ahead for the shape of a sound yet to be uttered.” – Sean O’Brien on Jo Clement
MICHAEL STEWART
Walking the Invisible & The Dogs
5pm, Assembly Room, Woodstock Town Hall, Market Place, Woodstock, OX20 1SL
£7
MICHAEL STEWART’s debut novel, King Crow (Bluemoose Books), was the winner of the Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Award and has been selected as a recommended read for World Book Night. He has written two other novels: Café Assassin (Bluemoose Books) and Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (HarperCollins); two short fiction collections: Mr Jolly (Valley Press) and Four Letter Words (Wrecking Ball Press); two poetry collections: Couples (Valley Press) and The Dogs (Smokestack Books); and a hybrid memoir: Walking the Invisible: Following in the Brontës’ Footsteps (HarperCollins). He is the creator of the Brontë Stones project, four monumental stones situated in the landscape between the birthplace and the parsonage, inscribed with poems by Kate Bush, Carol Ann Duffy, Jeannette Winterson and Jackie Kay, which he delivered in collaboration with the Bradford Literature Festival.
Michael’s appearance will be a two-part event. The first half will be on the subject of the often overlooked poetic output of the Bronte sisters and how their natural surroundings inspired their poetry. In the second half, Michael will be reading from his new collection The Dogs.
“In this inventive collection, Michael Stewart approaches Rilke’s proposition that, with dogs, we have created ‘a soul for which there is no heaven’. Origin stories, recent histories and a future when hierarchies are subverted mingle in an affecting, heady narrative that makes us think about human cruelty. These poems are exciting,
exhilarating, moving and profound.” - Helen Mort
MACGILLIVRAY with STEVE ELY
Ravage Book Launch
6.30pm, St Mary Magdalen Church, Park Street, Woodstock, OX20 1SJ
£10
MACGILLIVRAY is the matrilineal Highland pen-name of writer, artist and musician Kirsten Norrie who is the author of four poetry collections (Bloodaxe UK, Red Hen US). Her work has been featured on BBC Radio The Verb and Late Junction, in the Guardian and mainstream poetry journals and magazines. The MacGillivray Archive will be housed at the Scottish Poetry Library from 2023 onwards. She has published three books of poetry, The Last Wolf of Scotland (Pighog/Red Hen, 2013), The Nine of Diamonds: Surroial Mordantless (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) and The Gaelic Garden of the Dead (Bloodaxe Books, 2019). Ravage is due from Bloodaxe in 2023 and will be launched at the festival.
“MacGillivray’s poems come at us with one language wearing the pelt of another, and in the affray that follows it is hard to tell whether dead or living mouth carries the fiercer bite” - David Wheatley
STEVE ELY is a poet and writer based in Yorkshire. His publications include The European Eel & Lectio Violant (both 2021), Incendium Amoris (2017) and Englaland (2015). A pamphlet, Lives of British Shrews, was published by Broken Sleep Books in August 2023, and the book-length poems Eely (Longbarrow Press) and Orasaigh (Broken Sleep Books) will be published in late 2023 and the summer of 2024 respectively. He teaches creative writing at the University of Huddersfield, where he is Director of the Ted Hughes Network.
BACKLISTED PODCAST
Briggflatts by Basil Bunting, with guests Neil Astley & MacGillivray
8pm, St Mary Magdalen Church, Park Street, Woodstock, OX20 1SJ
£10
Hosted by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller, Backlisted has, over the last eight years, grown into one of the most popular and beloved book podcasts in the country. Each episode features a guest (usually a writer) who has chosen a book they love and which they think deserves a wider audience. If you don’t already listen to this podcast, we highly recommend you begin right this minute. There are nearly 200 episodes, with guests including Stephen Fry, Philip Pullman and the late Carmen Callil.
The book being discussed at the event will be Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), claimed by Cyril Connolly as ‘the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'.
Backlisted will be joined by guests MacGillivray, directly following the launch of her Bloodaxe collection Ravage, and Neil Astley, founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books, one of the leading poetry publishers in the UK and, arguably, the publisher most associated with Bunting’s work and legacy.
SUNDAY 3RD OF DECEMBER
NANCY CAMPBELL, JANE DRAYCOTT & DONALD GARDNER
A sequence of readings from three extraordinary poets.
3pm, Assembly Room, Woodstock Town Hall, Market Place, Woodstock, OX20 1SL
£10
NANCY CAMPBELL writes poetry, essays and non-fiction. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 led to books including The Library of Ice, How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet and Fifty Words for Snow. A memoir set closer to home, describing a summer of love, loss and vintage caravans, Thunderstone, was published last year by Elliot & Thompson.
JANE DRAYCOTT is a UK-based poet with a particular interest in audio and collaborative work. Her latest collection is The Kingdom (Carcanet Press), published autumn 2022. Previous collections include The Occupant (Carcanet 2016, Poetry Book Society recommendation) and Over (Carcanet), shortlisted for the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize. Nominated three times for the Forward Prize for Poetry, her first two full collections Prince Rupert's Drop (Carcanet) and The Night Tree (Carcanet/OxfordPoets) were both Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her translation of the 14th century dream-vision Pearl (Carcanet 2011), is a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation and was winner of the Stephen Spender Prize.
DONALD GARDNER, born in London in 1938, is a poet and freelance Dutch translator. He has lived in
Holland since 1979. He was originally a translator of Latin American literature and his published work
includes an acclaimed translation of Octavio Paz’s long poem, The Sun Stone (Cosmos, York 1968),
and Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of Purity (Cape, 1970). He also published translations of poems by
Ernesto Cardenal and contributed to Con Cuba, an anthology of Cuban poetry (Cape Goliard, 1969).
He translated the notoriously difficult novel Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in
collaboration with the author (Harper & Row, 1971). In 2015 he published his selection of Remco
Campert’s poetry, In Those Days (Shoestring Press), for which he was awarded the Vondel Prize for
Dutch-language translation. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including his New and
Selected Poems (1966-2020) published by Grey Suit Editions (2021).
JAMIE MCKENDRICK & JENNIE FELDMAN
The Years & No Cherry Time
5pm, Assembly Room, Woodstock Town Hall, Market Place, Woodstock, OX20 1SL
£10
JAMIE MCKENDRICK’s most recent publication is a self-illustrated poetry pamphlet, The Years, published in 2020. He edited The Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian Poems in 2004, and has translated all six books of Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara and the poetry of Antonella Anedda and Valerio Magrelli. A gathering of his writings on poetry and art, The Foreign Connection, was published in 2020.
JENNIE FELDMAN was born in South Africa, brought up in London, and graduated in Modern Languages (French) at Oxford. After a career in radio broadcasting, as well as teaching and editing, she became a freelance writer and translator. Until recently she spent much of her time in Jerusalem; there she was a volunteer with the Israeli NGO Humans Without Borders, which transports chronically ill Palestinian children from the West Bank to hospital appointments in Israel. (She has written on this, and on other Palestine-related subjects, in the Times Literary Supplement.) She is now based in Oxford. No Cherry Time is Jennie Feldman’s third collection of poems.
OPEN MIC hosted by Jenny Lewis
6.30pm, The Woodstock Social Club, 44 Oxford St, Woodstock OX20 1TT
£5
The Open mic is introduced by Jenny Lewis of The Poet's House, Oxford. This popular platform for local and unpublished poets is open to all but should be booked in advance. Special guests include:
MICHAEL BAYLEY, author of The Art of the Handkerchief, described by Penny Shuttle as '“a poet of assurance and fluid deliberation.”
LUCY INGRAMS has had work published in many magazines and journals, most recently Poetry Ireland Review and Agenda. She won the Manchester Poetry Prize in 2015 and the Magma Poetry Competition in 2016. Her debut pamphlet Light-fall was published by Flarestack Poets in 2019.
LAURA THEIS’ poetry debut, how to extricate yourself, was the winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize, an Oxford Poetry Library Book of the Month, and an Elgin Award nominee. Her work has received accolades such as the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize, the Hammond House International Literary Award for Poetry, the AM Heath Prize, and the Mogford Short Story Prize, as well as a Forward Prize nomination. She was a finalist for over forty international literary awards including the UK National Poetry Competition, the BBC Short Story Prize, the Alpine Fellowship, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.
HENDERSON:HOOPER
from 7.50pm, The Woodstock Social Club, 44 Oxford St, Woodstock OX20 1TT.
£10
Henderson:Hooper are a fiddle and guitar duo - Judith Henderson (Hooper) and Nick Hooper. They perform self-penned tunes, tunes by contemporary folk musicians and traditional tunes from England, France and Eastern Europe. They have been playing together since 2001, and are based in Oxfordshire.
Judith and Nick are familiar faces, having performed at the festival many times before. This year, they will be our closing act, treating us all to glorious music after a weekend of glorious words.