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This unique collaboration series between food & poetry will use flavour, scent, and colour in response to some of Scotland’s most distinct voices. A delicious evening which will touch all of your senses.

Hosted by Salitre award winning poet  Ryan Van Winkle, ‘Simmer’ pairs four poets with dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate and echo their work. Readings will be from Claire Askew, Christine DeLuca, Jo Clifford, and Harry Giles.

Claire Askew’s debut poetry collection, This changes things, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016 and was shortlisted for an Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, the 2016 Saltire First Book Award, the 2017 Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Award.  Claire is also a novelist, and her debut novel — winner of the 2016 Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize — is forthcoming from Hodder & Stoughton in August 2018.  Claire is the current Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh-based Christine De Luca writes in English and Shetlandic, her mother tongue.  She was Edinburgh’s Makar for 2014-2017.  Besides children’s stories and a novel, she has had seven poetry collections and four bi-lingual volumes published (French, Italian, Icelandic and Norwegian) and participated in festivals e.g. in Canada, India, France, Norway and Iceland.  

Jo Clifford is a playwright, poet, performer and teacher who is also a proud father and grandmother. She is the author of about 90 plays, many of which have been performed all over the world. 

Work this year includes “The House of Bernarda Alba” (Graeae and Royal Exchange, Manchester), “War in America” (Attic Collective). She has also been performing her “Gospel According to Jesus Queen Of Heaven” and the play continues to tour Brazil in a Portuguese translation. She has just returned from Uruguay and Argentina where the play is touring in Spanish. In the summer she performed “EVE”, which she co-wrote with Chris Goode, during the Edinburgh Fringe at the Traverse Theatre and the at the Citizens in Glasgow in a National Theatre of Scotland production. She is currently writing a new play for Manchester’s Royal Exchange.

Harry Giles is from Orkney and lives in Edinburgh. Their latest publication is the collection Tonguit from Freight Books, shortlisted for the 2016 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They were the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, co-direct the live art platform ANATOMY, and have toured participatory theatre across Europe and Leith. www.harrygiles.org

If the previous iteration of Simmer is anything to go by, it will be a surefire success, and a joy for all. The dinner costs £45 per person, with an optional drinks pairing of £35 with drinks chosen to match the menu, and of course, the poems. Dinner is served at 8pm and guests are welcomed to join us from 7:30 onwards.