Please join us to celebrate the launch of Savage Tales by Tara Bergin. Hosting the reading will be poet and writer Claudine Toutoungi. 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.

Tara Bergin’s third collection, Savage Tales continues to explore original territory, bringing the riddle, song and dialogue into a series of formally inventive and blackly comic sequences. Bergin’s book asks us to steer our way through a chorus of exchanges and situations, as she charts the fraught course between the making of individual poems and, uneasy bedfellow of this sustained activity, an authority which is always here called into question. Dramatizing the contemporary and the classic with great wit, ingenuity and panache, Savage Tales confirms Bergin as one of the outstanding poets of our time.
Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book.

Please note that there is a limited number of places for the reading, so do book early to avoid disappointment. You should receive a confirmation email with details on how to join after you register. If this does not arrive, please contact us to let us know. Please also be aware that clicking ‘attending’ on the Facebook event will not guarantee your place – you must complete the Zoom registration.

About the speakers:
Tara Bergin has published two collections of poetry with Carcanet Press, This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry), and The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes).
Claudine Toutoungi’s debut collection Smoothie (2017) and her second collection Two Tongues (2020) are published by Carcanet Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Financial Times and elsewhere. Claudine’s plays Bit Part and Slipping ran at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, and Slipping featured in New York’s Lark Play Centre’s HotINK series and was a Best Play Finalist in the 2015 Audio Drama Awards. She has written multiple other audio dramas for BBC Radio including Deliverers, This Is Your Country Now Too: Mira, seasons of Home Front, the comedy drama series The Inheritors, and several dramatizations. As a performer, her contributions to festivals and events across the UK include Tongue Fu, Kendal Poetry Festival and Shubbak at the National Theatre River Stage. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, In Touch and Poetry Please.