Words by the Water

Helen Farish: The Penny Dropping

Fri 14 March | 3pm

Helen Farish reads from and discusses her new poetry collection, The Penny Dropping. Described as having ‘the coherence of a novel’, the poems in Farish’s fourth collection tell a single compelling story which ‘unfailingly detains the reader’s attention’. Travelling across cultures and cities vividly evoked, the poems trace a love story via those moments of revelation when ‘the penny drops.’

Helen Farish’s award-winning first collection was Intimates (Cape, 2005) which won the Forward Prize for a debut collection. She has subsequently published three more collections, and The Penny Dropping has been shortlisted for the 2024 T.S.Eliot prize. Described by Bernard O’Donoghue as ‘a masterpiece’, the collection is also a Poetry Society Book of the Year 2024. Her poems can also be found in numerous anthologies, including The Poetry Pharmacy and The Poetry Pharmacy Forever.

Helen was Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust in 2005 and has also received a Hawthornden Fellowship.

Book: The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe)

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