Poetry meets prose: Zaffar Kunial in conversation with Jim Crace

As a novelist Jim Crace has created many worlds. Although they typically remain unspecific, his many years in the Midlands and in particular Birmingham have provided a curious inspiration.

Poet Zaffar Kunial grew up Birmingham and has drawn his own inspiration from the city.

In this unique event, two extraordinary writers share their writing worlds.

Chaired by Gregory Leadbetter

All events on National Poetry Day are sponsored by Birmingham City University.

About the speaker(s):

Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), Harvest (shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Melody and eden. He lives in Worcestershire.

Zaffar Kunial is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Us (2018), which was shortlisted for both the Costa Poetry Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In Us, Kunial, the son of an English mother and a Kashmiri father, takes his own identity as his central subject. His new collection England’s Green is published in 2022 with Faber & Faber. Zaffar was named one of the winners of the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize in early 2022.