Life-Writing Workshop with Poet and Novelist Helen Mort

Tuesday 15th February, 2.30pm - 4.30pm,
The Buttery, Wolfson College

Poet Mark Strand once told Wallace Shawn in a Paris Review interview that “You don’t read poetry for the kind of truth that passes for truth in the workaday world. You don’t read a poem to find out how you get to Twenty-fourth Street.” We assume that poetry dwells in the realm of allusion rather than denotative meaning. Meanwhile, we are preoccupied with biography and autobiography, a sense of the author as a person with a factual history, something we might seek in biography and memoir.

In this workshop, we will explore the value of lying in order to tell the truth and in truths that prove stranger than fiction. We'll reflect on 'confessional' poetry and fictionalising processes in memoir and life writing.

• Helen Mort is a poet and novelist. Her collection Division Street is published by Chatto & Windus and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her second collection ‘No Map Could Show Them’ was shortlisted for the Banff Mountain Literature Award. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Please note that there are limited places for this workshop. The waiting list has now been enabled on Eventbrite. If places become available, you will be contacted.

This in person workshop will take place in the The Buttery (accessibility information).

Wolfson College currently operates a mandatory indoor face coverings and one-metre social distancing policy while on the grounds, however, masks may be removed during the workshop itself.


Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/life-writing-workshop-with-poet-and-novelist-helen-mort-tickets-255549193517