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Join us at Edinburgh Food Studio for a unique collaboration between food & poetry. 

On this very special night, we 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 Connecticut born, Edinburgh resident Ryan Van Winkle, ‘Simmer’ pairs four poets with dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate and echo their work. Readings will be from Tessa Berring a poet and visual artist, Peter Mackay who writes evocatively in English and Gaelic, MacGillivray a performance artist, and Vicki Feaver shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and winner of the Forward prize for best single poem.

Poets

Tessa Berring is an Edinburgh based artist. Exhibitions include ‘Making an Appearance’, Patriothall Gallery, and ‘Mutated Stars’ at Whitespace Gallery, with Paulina Sandberg. Her work emerges from an exploration of the appearance/phenomenology of objects and often includes a written or performed poetic element. A number of her poems are published in both print and on­line journals including Magma, and the Berlin based, Leopardskin and Limes. A recent review describes Tessa Berring’s work as ”simultaneously humorous and unsettling. It subverts with credible untruths, unties what it seems to sew up, attracts and disgusts.”

Read Tessa’s poem ‘Whale’

*Vicki Feaver is the author of three poetry collections: Close Relatives (Secker, 1981); The Handless Maiden (Cape, 1994), winner of the Heinemann Award and shortlisted for the Whitebread Prize; and The Book of Blood (Cape, 2006), shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Poetry Award and the Forward Prize. Her poem ‘Judith’ won the Forward Prize for the best single poem. In 1993 she was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and in 1999 a Cholmondeley Award. She is a Professor Emerita at Chichester University where she previously taught creative writing. She now lives in Dunsyre in South Lanarkshire and Leith in Edinburgh.

Hear Vicki read ‘The Gun’ and her award­winning ‘Judith’ on the Poetry Archive.

*MacGillivray has walked in a straight line with a dead wolf on her shoulders through the back streets of Vegas into the Nevada desert, eaten broken chandelier glass in a derelict East German shopping mall, headbanged in gold medieval stocks in Birmingham allotments, burnt on a sunbed wearing conquistador armour in Edinburgh’s underground city, breast­fed a Highland swan in Oxford and regurgitated red roses in Greenland. She remains clan chief.

See MacGillivray perform here and find more of her work online here.

*Pàdraig MacAoidh (Peter Mackay) is originally from the Isle of Lewis, but now lives in Edinburgh. He writes in Scottish Gaelic and English and has written one full collection of poems,

Gu Leòr / Galore, published by Acair in 2105, and a pamphlet, From Another Island, published by Clutag Press in 2010. He is also a broadcaster and lecturer; he teaches at the University of St Andrews and is BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker 2015. Hear him read selections of his work in Gaelic and English on Lyrikline.

The price for this one-off colourful collaboration of dinner and poetry is £35. To book email book@edinburghfoodstudio.co or call 0131 258 0758.