Please join us to celebrate the launch of Lisa Kelly’s second collection, The House of the Interpreter, a Poetry Book Society Summer Recommendation 2023. Hosting the reading will be fellow Carcanet poet Jason Allen-Paisant. 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.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.

The House of the Interpreter, Lisa Kelly’s second collection, responds to the repression of British Sign Language (BSL) as its occasion and inspiration. Kelly develops the subject through extended sequences which attend to mushrooms and fungi, lifeforms that develop in secret, unnoticed, unappreciated, yet whose existence enriches everyday life. What can such hidden others teach us – if we attune all our senses?

Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her debut, A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet 2019), was shortlisted for for the Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize 2021. She is co-Chair of Magma Poetry and a regular host of poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House, London. She has been studying British Sign Language (BSL) for several years and has a Signature Level 6 qualification in BSL. Her poems have been selected for anthologies, including Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and the Forward Book of Poetry. In 2021, she co-edited What Meets the Eye, an anthology of poetry and short fiction by UK Deaf, deaf and Hard of Hearing writers for Arachne Press. She teaches poetry and performance, and is a freelance technology journalist. To escape noise, she walks and looks out for, among other things, fungi.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and academic who works as a senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry, and Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press, 2023). His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024.