On the occasion of 10 years of creative writing within the Department of English at the University of Malta, an evening of ekphrastic poetry is being held tonight in Msida.
British poet Graham Burchell and Maltese poet Abigail Ardelle Zammit will be reading a selection of poems inspired by art and music.
Burchell was born in Canterbury in 1950. From 1976 to 2003, he worked as a teacher in Wales, England, Zambia, Saudi Arabia, Tenerife, Mexico, France and Chile and lived in Houston, Texas before returning to Devon in 2007. He has an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University.
He has published four collections to date: Vermeer’s Corner, The Chongololo Club, Kate and Cottage Pi, the latter as third place winner in the inaugural Sentinel Poetry Book Competition. Burchell was also the 2012 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year, a 2013 Hawthornden Fellow, winner of the 2015 National Stanza Competition and runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition. His poem Anti-Mass was subsequently read on BBC Radio 4.
He frequently gives readings and runs poetry workshops and is one of the team that runs the annual Teignmouth Poetry Festival.
Zammit studied creative writing in Lancaster (UK) and is a lecturer in English at the G.F. Abela Junior College and visiting lecturer at the University of Malta, where she has taught creative writing for the past 10 years.
Her first collection, Voices from the Land of Trees, was published in 2007 and takes its inspiration from Guatemala’s violent past. Zammit has had poems published in a number of British and Canadian journals. In 2013, she won first prize in the Alan Sillitoe Poetry competition while her PhD collection Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin won second prize in the inaugural Sentinel Poetry Book Competition (UK) and was published in December 2015.
In October 2015, she participated in a British Council project called Walking Cities with the Next Generation Poet Hannah Lowe and was a guest poet at the Inizjamed Mediterranean literature festival last year.
• The poetry reading is open to the public and entrance is free. The event is being organised by the Department of English Students Association, tonight at 7pm at the Faculty of Arts Library within the Old Humanities Building (second floor) at the University of Malta in Tal-Qroqq, Msida. For more information on the poets, visit www.gburchell.com and http://abigailardellezammit.net .