Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Owner of the Sea: Three Inuit Stories Retold, the new collection by Richard Price. Hosting the reading will be fellow Carcanet poet, David Kinloch, joining Richard to discuss the new edition. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will also be showing extracts of the text during the reading so that you can read along.

In re-telling the Inuit sequences included here, Richard Price opens out remarkable northern vistas and unfamiliar narratives, strange gods and unforgettable characters. Carol Rumens described Price as a poet who is ‘brilliant quietly: inventive, sometimes dazzling, but never merely showy’: precisely the talents for rendering, rather than appropriating these great story-cycles of Inuit culture.

Here we learn of ‘Sedna the Sea Goddess’ and ‘Kiviuq the Hunter’, the central protagonists of the book’s remarkable stories. They are rich in extraordinary incident. In Sedna’s world women can marry dogs and have half-puppy, half-human children; birds beat their wings so hard they call down a storm on a fugitive kayak; walruses originate from… well that would be telling. Each story-cycle abounds in natural wonder, celebrating our creaturely relations with our fellow inhabitants of land and sea. ‘The Old Woman Who Changed Herself Into A Man’, a short narrative, bridges the major sequences, telling the story of an older woman and a younger one who become lovers in the isolation of their remote home.