William Thompson grew up in and around Helpston, the birthplace of John Clare, a man referred to during his lifetime as the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’ and described by Jonathan Bate as ‘the greatest labouring-class poet England has ever produced’. Clare towered over the landscape of his youth: the prospect for Thompson, of writing about it in his shadow, was daunting. More recently, however, he has started to see a way of doing so, by telling the truth about what that landscape is like almost 200 years later.

His poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Wild Court, The Honest Ulsterman, Lighthouse, The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21, and other magazines and anthologies.

John Goodridge is a retired Professor of English, his special interests as a lecturer included poetry, eighteenth and nineteenth century literature, Romanticism, recovery research, labouring-class poets especially John Clare, and a range of modern and contemporary writings including writers on the Spanish Civil War, the poet Tony Harrison, and the novelist Philip K Dick. With Bridget Keegan, he edited A History of British Working Class Literature and his book John Clare the Trespasser, co-authored with R.K.R. Thornton, was published by Five Leaves.

The evening will be supported by a short reading from Lucy  Grace. Lucy is an author of fiction and a Midlands4Cities-funded PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at NTU. She is writing a novel set in an English coalscape

A Nottingham Trent University Creative Writing Hub event

Free for students and staff at NTU

Refreshments included