Poets & Writers Theater

“The first half having been / given up to space, I decided / to devote my remaining life to time, this thing we live / on fishily or on like moss,” reads Hannah Sullivan from her poem “Happy Birthday,” which appears in her collection Was It for This, in this Faber & Faber video featuring photographs and archival footage.

“There are some stones that open in the night like flowers / Down in the red graveyard where Bessie haunts her lovers.” In this video, Jackie Kay, national poet laureate of Scotland, reads her poem “The Red Graveyard” about her connection to American blues singer Bessie Smith. Kay’s biography Bessie Smith is forthcoming in February from Faber.

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

“A washing line strung from our house to theirs, / those neighbourly neighbours, settlers / from a lost age and a childless planet.” From his attic, Simon Armitage reads his poem “Miniatures” from his latest collection, Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (Faber & Faber, 2020).

“Anything will break given sufficient strain.” Nobel Prize–winning author William Golding speaks about the optimism that may often go unnoticed in his novel Lord of the Flies for this Faber & Faber video celebrating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the book.

“The type moves and dances across the page—and it’s very much a book about sound on the page.” Max Porter talks about the unique typesetting in his second novel, Lanny (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, at the London Centre for Book Arts.

“I think there’s also in the book a sort of collective mind-set, which is seen as more important than the individual identity or autonomy.” Anna Burns talks about her third novel, Milkman (Faber & Faber, 2017), for which she won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, making her the award’s first Northern Irish honoree.

“I don’t want to prescribe how I think people should feel about it, although secretly I do have a particular response that I prefer.” Sally Rooney, author of the debut novel, Conversations With Friends (Faber & Faber, 2017), talks about reactions to the ambiguity of the book’s ending. Rooney is the winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award for the novel, which was also shortlisted for the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize.

Michael Dickman reads a poem from Brother (Faber & Faber, 2016), a dual-authored collection with his brother Matthew Dickman, which brings together verse written when their older sibling took his own life.

Yuri Herrera reads from his debut novel, Kingdom Cons (Faber & Faber, 2012), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, at a 2012 Litquake event at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Herrera's second novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World (And Other Stories, 2015), also translated by Dillman, is the winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in fiction.

“Masons, when they start upon a building, / Are careful to test out the scaffolding...” The late Seamus Heaney reads his poem “Scaffolding” on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2009.

The Northern Irish novelist and poet reads from his poetry collections at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2013. Laird's debut collection, To a Fault (Faber & Faber, 2005), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His latest collection, Go Giants, was published by Norton in 2013.

"That her skydance went for nothing / hanging fire on empty air." David Harsent reads "Bowland Beth" from his 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize–winning collection, Fire Songs (Faber & Faber, 2014).

"Modernism displaces its readers into the future.... I wanted to kind of purge myself of those tendencies." The award-winning poet and author, whose latest novel, 10:04, was published by Faber & Faber last September, speaks with Paul Holdengräber about modernist literature and what sincerity means.

The author of The Uncommon Reader (FSG, 2007) reads from "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," one of the two stories in his new collection, Smut, published earlier this year by Faber and Faber and Profile Books in England and forthcoming in the U.S. next month from Picador.

Ukranian-born singer-songwriter Alina Simone released her latest album, Meet Your Own Danger, in June, the same month Faber and Faber published her first book, a collection of essays titled You Must Go and Win. Here's Simone performing "My Love Is a Mountain" at Union Hall in New York City.

To promote her new book of essays, You Must Go and Win, published by Faber and Faber this month, Ukrainian-born musician Alina Simone asked a few poets, including James Copeland, Anna Moschovakis, Matvei Yankelevich, Brett Flecher Lauer, Tao Lin, Claire Donato, and Jeff T. Johnson, to read some Craigslist posts.