Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Idea of an Entire Life by Billy-Ray Belcourt. The reading will be hosted by Andrew McMillan. 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, 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.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Hk0RZS10SiuF_jlmWFIwBw#/registration and let us know you can make it by joining and sharing the Facebook listing https://www.facebook.com/events/1922350521889724

Daring and vulnerable, this is the highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Billy-Ray Belcourt.

In The Idea of An Entire Life, Belcourt delivers an intimate examination of twenty-first-century anguish, love, queerness, and political possibility. Through lyric verse, sonnets, fieldnotes, and fragments, the poems—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes slyly humorous—are always finely crafted, putting to use the autobiographical and philosophical style that has come to define Belcourt’s body of work. By its close, the collection makes the urgent argument that we are each our own little statues of grief and awe.

‘When I wrote my first book of poetry,’ reflects Belcourt, ‘I wrote from a place of desperation. I wanted very desperately to live a full queer Indigenous life and I wasn’t sure if I would attain it. The Idea of an Entire Life began with the realization that I have that life now and so I wanted to think through the ways a queer Indigenous life is hampered by history but nonetheless full of possibility. What will the rest of my life make available to me? How has the twentieth century indelibly shaped me and my community? The book is about my reserve in northern Alberta, how the past tailgates me wherever I go. It’s also about my coming-into-being as a queer Indigenous man and how I’ve tried to remake my conditions of living to enable flourishing and possibility.’

About the speakers:

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation in North West Alberta, Canada. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. He is the author of six books, three of poetry and three of prose. He is the youngest-ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his debut collection This Wound is a World. In 2015, he was named the first-ever First Nations Rhodes Scholar from Canada. He has been long-listed for the Dublin International Literary Award and a two-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. He has been nominated for several major literary awards in Canada.

Andrew McMillan’s debut collection physical was the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers’ award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards. Physical has been translated into French, Galician, German and Norwegian editions, with a double-edition of physical & playtime published in Slovak in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024, and was named as one of the top 20 books of 2024 by The Independent. It has been translated into numerous languages including Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Turkish and Slovak.