Off the Shelf: Poetry with Helen Mort and Katharine Towers

When a new relationship casts poet Helen Mort in the role of stepmother, she embarks on a personal quest for understanding; moving across verse and personal essay, from fairytale to modern blended family. Groundbreaking and transformative, STEPMOTHER sees Helen turn an inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of female experience in this candid new collection.  

The Worrying Rose Katharine Towers’ new collection distils her thinking about women, creativity and solitude. Nuns and female hermits sit alongside the voices of writers and artists such as Nan Shepherd and Maggi Hambling. This haunting collection of poems have an intricate musicality and attest to an almost spiritual attentiveness to the natural world.

Helen Mort has published three collections of poetry and been shortlisted for the Forward, T. S. Eliot and Costa Prizes. She has written a novel, a short story collection and creative non-fiction including  A Line Above The Sky, winner of the Boardman Tasker Award. She is a Professor in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and lives in Sheffield. 

Katharine Towers was born in London and now lives in Derbyshire. Her first collection The Floating Man was the winner of the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Her second collection The Remedies was shortlisted for the TS Prize and her third, Oak, was a Poetry Book of the Month in The Guardian. 

‘Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women’ Sarah Hall, author of Helm 

Katharine Towers writes with a marvellously gentle wit and a metrical intelligence . . The Observer

This event is part of Off the Shelf: Festival of Words from the University of Sheffield. The full festival programme is available here: https://offtheshelf.org.uk/events/ 

The event is organised by the Off the Shelf Festival. Views expressed at this event do not reflect those of Sheffield Museums.