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 Emily Ballou, JL Williams, Ron Butlin, and Tom Pow.
Emily Ballou is an Australian poet, novelist and screenwriter. The Darwin Poems (University Western Australia Press) was awarded the 2010 Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize, highly commended in the Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, the Mary Gilmore Prize, the ALS Gold Medal and the WA Premier’s Prize. She lives in Scotland.
Books by JL Williams include Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), Our Real Red Selves (Vagabond Poets, 2015) and House of the Tragic Poet (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016). A new collection exploring the fine line between abundance and apocalypse, After Economy, was published by Shearsman Books in May 2017. She is interested in expanding dialogues through poetry across languages, perspectives and cultures and in cross-form work, visual art, dance, opera and theatre.
With an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist, RON BUTLIN is a former Edinburgh Makar / Poet Laureate. He has published nearly twenty books and his work has won many prizes and been translated into over a dozen languages. His previous novel, Ghost Moon, was nominated for the international IMPAC Prize 2016. This year sees the publication of a new novel,Billionaires’ Banquet; a novel for early teens, Steve & FranDan Take on the World; and a book of verse for children, Day of the Trolls! He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and their dog. His website: www.ronbutlin.co.uk
Tom Pow has written across a range of genres, including fiction, non-fiction, drama and works for children. But he is primarily a poet. His work explores the domestic, but it also travels to other places and other periods. Dear Alice, Narratives of Madness concerns the legacy of a nineteenth century lunatic asylum, while A Wild Adventure is a speculative poetic biography of Thomas Watling, a Dumfries forger transported to Botany Bay. In The Becoming, New and Selected Poems, was published in 2009 and Recolectores de Nueces, a bi-lingual selection of poems, translated by Jorge Fondebrider, was published in Mexico in 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 £42 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.
