Poetry reading by international poet Karen Solie

5 March 2013

Poetry reading by international poet Karen Solie

Award-winning Canadian poet Karen Solie will read poetry in Wellington next week at a one-off event presented by Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), in partnership with City Gallery Wellington.

Karen comes to Wellington fresh from appearances at the Cork Poetry Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week.

Chris Price, a Senior Lecturer at the IIML, says Karen’s visit is an excellent opportunity for literary enthusiasts in Wellington to hear a contemporary international poet.

“Karen’s poems explore how we inhabit and exploit our urban and rural landscapes in the 21st century.

“While she focuses on the Canadian experience, her images will be familiar to New Zealanders—lakes and rivers turning brown with agricultural run-off, oil rigs and fracking, our apparent inability to find a way out of the mess we’re making. And she’s equally alert to the fragile nature of love and reason,” she says.

In 2001, Karen’s first collection Short Haul Engine was awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and nominated for three other prizes. In 2005, she published her second collection Modern and Normal and her 2009 collection Pigeon won three prizes, including the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Griffin Prize Judges’ citation says: “It's the particular affliction of desire—and the corrosive effects of human desire both upon ourselves and the world we inhabit—that Solie most often meditates upon in poems as humorous, often, as they are sobering.”

Karen also represented Canada at Simon Armitage's Poetry Parnassus, the Poetry Olympics in London last year.

Karen’s visit has been made possible with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Event: Writers on Mondays: Karen Solie
Date: Monday 11 March 2013, 12.15–1.15pm
Venue: City Gallery, Civic Square, Wellington

This event is free and open to the public.

ENDS

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