Please join us to celebrate the launch of Late Gifts by Richard Price. Hosting the reading will be Alan Riach. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Late Gifts is a joyful and anxious book. The eponymous late gift, this book’s occasion, is a son, born to a middle-aged father. How does this change his sense of present and future, of time itself? The poet focuses on this demanding and joyful relationship in terms that are funny and re-energising, his world renewed. The child’s future makes more urgent environmental and politics themes that have long been a concern for the poet.

Price, a versatile and experimental writer, develops new forms for his subject matter. The lyric investigates the visual disposition of the poem – the use of white spaces – and the possibilities of the prose poem. This, Price’s first collection in six years, is direct and idiomatic in style.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

About the speakers:

Richard Price is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library and a tutor at the Poetry School, London. He has published over a dozen books of poetry since his debut in 1993, including Lucky Day (2005), which was a Guardian Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Since then, every Carcanet collection he has published has been shortlisted for a major prize. In 2012 his poem ‘Hedge Sparrows’ was chosen to represent Team GB in the Olympics project ‘The Written World’. A year later, Small World (2012) won the Creative Scotland Award in his home country. It was followed by another Guardian Book of the Year, Moon for Sale (2017), which was also shortlisted for the Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year. Price’s most recent book is his re-telling of Inuit stories in The Owner of the Sea (2021), which was a Scotsman Book of the Year.

Born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, educated at Cambridge and Glasgow, Alan Riach went to the University of Waikato, New Zealand, as Associate Professor in 1986. He returned to Scotland in 2001 as Reader in the Department of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, where he is now Professor. He is the author of works of criticism on the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid, editor of MacDiarmid’s collected works for Carcanet Press, and has written or edited several volumes on twentieth century Scottish literature. He is co-author with Alexander Moffat of two books on art and culture in modern Scotland. Riach has published six collections of his own poetry and has recently worked on English-language versions of 18th-century Gaelic poems.