Instituto Cervantes Manchester and Leeds Poetry’s Club celebrates its third edition dedicated to “Contemporary Female Poetry in Spanish”. The year starts with the readings of the poems of the Spanish poet Elena Medel with whom we will have the chance to talk and comment on her poems.

Elena Medel is the editorial director of La Bella Varsovia, an independent poetry publisher. She has published the poetry books: Mi primer bikini (2002; translated into English by Lizzie Davis, My First Bikini, 2015), Tara (2006) and Chatterton (Loewe Young Poets Prize, 2014) and chapbooks Vacaciones [Holidays, 2004] and Un soplo en el corazón [Heartmurmur. 2007]. She is also the author of El mundo mago [The World of Wonders, 2015], an essay about Antonio Machado. Medel has collected her poems in the volume Un dia negro en una casa de mentira [A Dark Day in the House of Lies, 2015), and she has been translated into a dozen languages.

The Poetry club is coordinated by Diana Cullell, Professor at the University of Liverpool.

Diana Cullell is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool and a specialist in Spanish and Catalan literature and culture. She has published on different authors and literary movements, with an interest in new forms of poetry and its new interpretations; Contemporary Spanish and Catalan Poetry; representations of the body in literature or the Spanish poetry market from 1980 to the present. Her publications include La perfopoesía española en el siglo XXI: una revolución poética (Madrid: Amargord, 2019); Spanish Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology(Manchester University Press, 2014); or La Poesía de la Experiencia Española de Finales del Siglo XX al XXI (Madrid: Devenir, 2010).