Sheffield Hallam brings acclaimed poet to the city

18th April 2018

Award-winning poet, Jo Shapcott is set to come to Sheffield as part of a creative writing masterclass series hosted by Sheffield Hallam University.

The multi-award winning author has written eight books, including Of Mutability (2010), winner of the Costa Book Award; My Life Asleep (1999), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; Phrase Book (1992); and Electroplating the Baby (1988), winner of the Commonwealth Prize. She is twice a winner of the National Poetry Competition, and in 2011 she received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. As part of Sheffield Hallam's Creative Writing Masterclass programme, Jo Shapcott will be hosting her event: Chasing your own ambulance: poetry and medicine. Jo will discuss some questions that emerge when we bring poetry, the body and medical science together. Can we precisely locate the boundary of the internal body with the exterior world and what is the poetic significance of this border? Can we find a language for the body and its functions, particularly its invisible sensations, like pain? If the body is gendered, must the poem be too? Can a poem perform the embodied consciousness? Dr Harriet Tarlo is a reader in creative writing at Sheffield Hallam University and organiser of the creative writing masterclass series. Dr Tarlo said: "Jo is a highly-valued visiting professor to our creative writing courses and will also be giving tutorials and a workshop to students. We hope to attract a good crowd in the evening from writers and others, such as Health and Wellbeing staff and students who may well be interested in her work around medical science initiated by her own struggles with cancer ten years ago." Jo's masterclass will take place on Wednesday 18 April at Sheffield Hallam University's City Campus in the Norfolk Building, room 210 at 6:10pm. The Creative Writing Masterclass events organised and led by Sheffield Hallam University are all free, open to the public and do not require pre-event registration.