Literature North West

When : 25th January 2008 - 8:00pm
Where : Tullie House
Price : £4.00

Border Poets and Mudfog Press of Teesside present:

Pat Borthwick, Geoff Tomlinson and John Harrison

Pat Borthwick was born in Lincoln and much of her upbringing was spent on the canals and waterways of Britain. She now lives in rural North Yorkshire. Pat first trained in visual art and worked for many years as a ceramic sculptor. She has been Writer in Residence for prisons, libraries, schools and hospitals as well as for a coal mine and a chalk cliff. On community projects Pat frequently collaborates with other artists. Her work has been widely published in magazines and she enjoys a national reputation for her sparkling readings. Roger Garfitt has described her as ‘a conjuror with real stars up her sleeve’ and Simon Armitage as ‘a mapmaker with whose maps you can surely find your way.’ Swim is her latest collection from Mudfog.

Geoff Tomlinson was born in Barnoldswick, West Yorkshire, and brought up in Burnley, Lancashire. His parents were cotton weavers, but the family had been dairy farmers, a tradition his brother Jack continued. He taught in Lancashire and Dorset before moving to County Durham as a lecturer. Casual work has included being a roller-carrier in a mill, a postman, milk roundsman, market gardener, farmhand, literature examiner and small press (Platform Poets) editor. His latest collection from Mudfog is A19.

John Harrison was raised in Leeds. He has lived for over twenty years in the village of Skelton, near Saltburn. 2001 saw the publication by Mudfog of his Not The Last Bus Back from Loftus, a first collection of poems. Latterly, like his alter ego in the poems, he has been working as a security guard at Boulby Potash Mine. This followed a winter without a job. The poems draw on these experiences, as they do on a previous spell as a hospital worker, on being made redundant and on the author’s Buddhism.

www.mudfog.co.uk