Writing Vital Nature Poems with Karen McCarthy Woolf - RECORDING ONLY

This is a RECORDING ONLY TICKET (from an event in December 2025). Expect inspiring reading and writing with lots of ideas on how you might approach nature writing... 

Karen McCarthy Woolf will explore some of today’s urgent and inspirational poems engaging with the natural world by Black, Asian and global-majority poets in the UK. Nature matters everywhere and for everyone and everything. Inclusivity and a variety of perspectives and approaches are vital to challenge our habitual thinking and to drive the much needed change in our treatment of and views on nature.

Widespread environmental destruction and climate change sit alongside toxic narratives around race, migration and people who leave one land for another. It sits alongside ancient Indigenous wisdom and cultural histories that have had to fight to survive the sharp end of colonisation. How can we expand our own perspectives on nature and history? How can we attune our attention to voices and perspectives that challenge conventional ideas of nature as an extractive resource or aestheticised other?

Through a combination of close reading, writing exercises and group discussion Karen will lead a bespoke workshop designed to broaden our perception of what a nature poem is and can be.  Poems for this workshop will be sourced from Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf (Faber, 2025).

Dr Karen McCarthy Woolf, recently shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2024 for Top Doll (Dialogue Books), was born in London to English and Jamaican parents. She is the author of three poetry books and the editor of numerous literary anthologies. Karen's University of London doctoral research explored ways in which poetry might challenge a Eurocentric bias in ecopoetics. As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was writer in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her debut An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet Press, 2014), was an Observer Book of the Year and her second collection, Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet Press, 2017), was a winner in the inaugural Laurel Prize for ecopoetry. McCarthy Woolf has performed her work worldwide – in the US, Caribbean, Asia and across Europe at venues including the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican and Kings Place for Poetica Electronica, which showcased music collaborations with various dance and techno producers. Her poems have been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, Polish and Dutch, produced as an animated and choreographed short film, exhibited by Poems on the Underground and dropped from a helicopter over the Houses of Parliament. 

2 hours long

Recording available until 18th October

Cost £25 GBP (with cost effective exchange via STRIPE)

If you came to this original workshop and want to listen again email me and I'll send you a code for a half price ticket.

How does a RECORDING ONLY TICKET work?
You'll be given access to the recording and the handouts for the workshop. You need to listen to it before the expiry date listed above. It's useful to mark in your diary when you'll do the workshop (a limited timeframe can actually help you get around to it.) Your confirmation email will include a login code on email, plus a link to download the handout. Get in touch with me if you you can any questions or issues. Enjoy!

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