Two Simmer: Poetry and Flavour.

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After the overwhelming success of the March’s event, Simmer, a night of poetry and flavour, we are again joined by our host, Ryan Van Winkle, for a night where we pair four poets with dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate and echo their work.

This unique collaboration 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.

Simmer pairs four poets with exquisite dishes carefully selected & prepared to illuminate their work. Readings will be from Krystelle Bamford, Alan Gillis whose work has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Colin Herda poet and Lecturer in Creative Writing at Glasgow University and the versatile weaver of styles Elspeth Murray.

Most recently, Krystelle Bamford’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review and The Kenyon Review. In 2010, she was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and was shortlisted for the 2011 Bridport Prize. Though raised in the US, she has been living in Edinburgh for the past nine years.

Alan Gillis is from Belfast and now lives in Scotland, where he teaches English at The University of Edinburgh. He has published four poetry collections with The Gallery Press: Scapegoat (2014), Here Comes the Night (2010), Hawks and Doves (2007) and Somebody, Somewhere (2004), which won the Strong Award for Best First Collection in Ireland. He has also been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot prize, and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. In 2014 he was selected as a ‘Next Generation Poet’ by the Poetry Book Society in the UK. As a critic he is author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (2005), and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012), both published by Oxford University Press, along with many essays on contemporary Irish and British poetry. From 2010-2015 he was editor of Edinburgh Review. A Selected Poems entitled Scapegoat and Other Poems will be published in the USA by Wake Forest Press in 2016.

Colin Herd is a poet and lecturer in creative writing at University of Glasgow. Books include too ok (Blazevox, 2011), Glovebox (KFS, 2013), Oberwildling (with SJ Fowler, ACF, 2015) and Press Back Up Help (forthcoming). He is a co-organiser of the new poetry festival Outside-In/Inside-Out which launches in Glasgow in October 2016.

With over 20 years of collaborative work in education, health, business and the performing arts, Elspeth Murray is a writer who enjoys the unpredictable. Her poetry residencies have taken place in shopping centres, distilleries, international conferences, hospices and schools. Her workplace residencies feature in a 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary Blood, Sweat, Tears and Poetry. Elspeth’s poem Flip Flotsam inspired an award-winning documentary of the same name, while This Is Bad Enough has supported health literacy policy work in several countries. Commissioned work includes poems that have been set to music by Dee Isaacs for a staging of the Sufi classic Conference of The Birds at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh in 2013 and a response to the refugee crisis Postcards From Our World in 2016. Her poem about her local Hungarian lollipop lady for the Edinburgh Unsung anthology features in The Scotsman on 2nd July 2016.

If you would like to join in this evening of thought, lyrics and flavours, please book early to avoid disappointment. 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 £35 per person, with an optional drinks pairing of £30 with drinks chosen to match the menu, and of course, the poems.

Mail book@edinburghfoodstudio.co or call 0131 258 0758 to secure your place!