‘A poet of enchantment and persuasion’ (The Los Angeles Review of Books). One of America’s most celebrated poets, published for the first time in the UK in 2022, Carl Phillips delivers this year’s John Ryland’s Reading.

His latest work featured in ‘Then The War and Selected Poems, 2007-2020’ examines the moral ambiguities of making a life with another person in the face of political upheaval and world crisis and attempting to create joy when the world is on fire.

Publishers Weekly described his new work as ‘lyrically rich, insightful poems…full of palpable aching’. Shortlisted for the Best Single Poem in the 2022 Forward Prizes for Poetry with ‘Scattered Snows, to the North’, he is also the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hosted by John McAuliffe and presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester.