Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. His two poetry collections, both published by Faber and Faber, are Us (2018) and England’s Green (2022).

Zaffar Kunial is a proven master of taking things apart, polishing the fugitive parts of single words, of a sound, a colour, the name of a flower, and putting them back together so that we see them in an entirely different light.

In the poems of England’s Green, we are invited to look at the place and the language we think we know, and we are made to think again. With everything so newly set, we are alert, as the poet is, to the ‘dark missing / step in a stair’, entering this new world with bated breath. By lose attention to the parts, the poems have a genius for invoking absence, whether that be a missing father, the death of a mother or a path not taken.

Fully formed, they share a centre of gravity: migrations, memories, little transgressions and disturbances, summoned and contained in small gestures – a hand held, the smell of a newly bred rose or the scratch a limpet makes to mark its home.

Support readings will come from several of NTU’s superb student poets, including PhD student Julie Gardner; Elle Jacobson, a student on the BA Creative Writing at NTU;  Sarah Smith and Oliver Shaw, both on the MA Creative Writing at NTU.

Tickets cost £4.00 including refreshments, but free to NTU staff and students

In association with Nottingham Trent University’s Creative Writing Hub