In October 2024, the writers Helen Calcutt and Hannah Copley visited Oxford Brookes University and gave terrific readings from their latest poetry collections: Feeling All the Kills and Lapwing. We took advantage of their being here to interview them about their work - an interview that was conducted by our two current Poetry Centre Interns, Ruby McKie and Marie Kennedy, who are both in their second year at Brookes studying English Literature with Creative Writing.
So in this episode, you’ll first hear Ruby quizzing Helen, then Marie asking Hannah about her collection, and then some general discussion about the two collections’ shared interests. The episode concludes with Ruby and Marie reflecting on their own writing and how their reading of Helen and Hannah’s work has inspired them.
Helen Calcutt is a poet, dance artist, and choreographer. She is the author of collections Somehow (Verve Poetry Press) a PBS Winter Bulletin Pamphlet & Poetry School Book of the Year (2020); Unable Mother (V. Press, 2018); and Feeling All the Kills (Pavilion Poetry, 2024) a verse account of assault and recovery. Helen is the creator and editor of anthology Eighty-Four: Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope (Verve Press, 2019). It was shortlisted for a Saboteur Award and a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, 2019.
Helen is the Artistic Director of cross-arts theatre company ‘Beyond Words’. Her dance adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers was funded by Arts Council England and supported by One Dance U.K. and the Birmingham REP Theatre. Helen was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters by Loughborough University for her outstanding contribution to the arts in 2023.
You can follow Helen on Instagram and find out more about Helen on her website.
Hannah Copley is a poet, editor and researcher. Her second collection, Lapwing, was published in 2024 by Pavilion Poetry and explores restlessness, addiction, and ecological and personal grief. It was selected as a 2024 Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation, shortlisted for the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize, and was awarded second prize in the 2024 Laurel Prize. Hannah’s first collection, Speculum, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.
Her work has appeared in POETRY, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Stand, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, Blackbox Manifold and other magazines and anthologies, and she has previously won the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the York Literature Festival Prize. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Westminster and a poetry editor at Stand magazine.
Hannah is on Instagram and you can read more about Hannah work on her website.