Lancaster writer is main speaker at Settle Sessions

The 2015 Settle Sessions kick off on Friday April 17 with home-grown talent Carole Coates one of the main speakers.

Carole’s most recent publication, a pamphlet called Crazy Days published in November 2014, met with literary acclaim.

Scottish poet and playwright, Carol Ann Duffy, who was made Britain’s poet laureate in May 2009, described Crazy Days as “stunningly, beautifully, heart-breakingly marvellous”.

“It’s one of the best things I’ve read all year,” she said.

Married to critic John Oates, Carole from Lancaster has had three poetry collections and will have her first novel published next year.

She was given a Yorkshire Arts Award for an early poetry sequence and won the Nottingham Open Poetry Prize in 2011.

Carole helps to run The April Poets in Lancaster which promotes the best of regional poetry and gives a voice to new and established writers in North Lancashire and Cumbria.

Also a member of the reading and performance group, Sixfold, Carole is renowned as an experienced and entertaining performer.

She said: “ I offer a lively reading of poems which vary from a satirical homage to Tracey Emin to off-beat accounts of the post-religious universe, by way of elegies, poems of love and anorexia and engagements with John Osborne, God and other tyrants.”

Second main speaker on the night will be Carole Bromley who teaches Creative Writing at York University. Some of Carole’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review, Magma, Rialto, The North, Interpreter’s House, Poetry News, Ink Sweat and Tears.

Her first collection, A Guided Tour of the Ice House, was published in 2011 and she won first prizes in Bridport, Yorkshire Open, Torbay and Bronte Society literary competitions.

Carole who has lived in York for 40 years will be judging the York Poetry Competition this year.

The evening will also include an open mic session featuring local writing and favourite poems.

Floe Shakespeare and Hilary Holdsworth will take part, with Ann Pilling and John Raubenheimer readng from the poet Elizabeth Bishop.

Tickets for the event at The Folly in Settle are £6 (£5.50 for members) available from Cave and Crag and 01729 823305. More details at www.settlesessions.co.uk.

Other Settle Sessions this year will be in June, September and November.