Esther Morgan Readings
Esther Morgan's fourth collection The Wound Register, published by Bloodaxe in March 2018, was shortlisted for the poetry category of the 2018 East Anglian Book Awards. It was runner-up for the 2019 New Angle Prize for Literature. Esther gave readings from the collection at King's Lynn Poetry Festival in September 2018, and at Poetry in Aldeburgh and Woodstock Poetry Festival in November 2018.
The Wound Register, or Casualty Book – which gives this book its title – is an official record of the casualty and sickness details for more than fifteen thousand soldiers of the Norfolk Regiment during the First World War. Esther Morgan’s great-grandfather was killed at the Somme. In an unflinching sequence written to her grandmother, she explores the trauma of losing a father in combat, while other poems address the missing soldier directly as he hovers on the brink of living memory. Morgan’s experience of coming late to motherhood brings the book into the present, giving her alertness to loss a fresh urgency as she traces the legacy of three generations.
Esther Morgan received an Eric Gregory Award in 1998, and her first collection, Beyond Calling Distance, was published by Bloodaxe in 2001. It won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her second collection, The Silence Living in Houses (2005), was largely inspired by her time caretaking a run-down Edwardian house in Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. In 2010 she won the Bridport Poetry Prize for her poem ‘This Morning’, included in her third collection Grace (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
FORTHCOMING READING
Sunday 27 April 2025, 1-2pm, INK Festival
Esther Morgan will be reading with Rebecca Goss - two poets rooted in rural Suffolk.
More details in the flipzine programme (page 20) here.
Sunday ticket: £30
[12 November 2018]
