Liz Berry with Guest Becky Cullen

Making her Southwell Library debut is the hugely popular West Midlands poet Liz Berry, celebrated for her often beautiful, always striking poems about the natural world, the body, motherhood and more, all imbued with the Black Country lilt of her home.

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country and now lives in Birmingham. Her first book of poems, Black Country (Chatto 2014), a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014. Liz's pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto, 2018) was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018. Her latest collection is The Dereliction (Hercules Editions, 2021), a collaboration with artist Tom Hicks. Liz is a patron of Writing West Midlands and works as a tutor for organizations including the Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School. 

Liz is introducing a guest poet, Nottingham-based Becky Cullen, poet, educator, and researcher. She has taught across Nottingham in local secondary schools, at an international college, and now at Nottingham Trent University where she teaches and researches contemporary writing. Her first poetry pamphlet ‘Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings’ won the Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2017/18.

“I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”  From The Republic of Motherhood by Liz Berry

“vowels ferrous as nails, consonants

you could lick the coal from.” From Homing by Liz Berry

Tickets £10

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