Mervyn Morris will be joined by John Hegley and Mimi Khalvati, two highly distinctive poets whose work challenges and engages diverse audiences in its choice of subject, language and form.

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 Mervyn Morris was born in Kingston in 1937. He studied at the University College of the West Indies and, as a Rhodes Scholar, at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. From 1966 – 2002 he was on the staff of the University of the West Indies, from which he retired as Professor of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature. His books of poems include The Pond, Shadowboxing and Examination Centre, On Holy Week and I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. There is a Poetry Archive CD of Mervyn Morris Reading from his Poems. He edited Selected Poems by Louise Bennett, It A Come by Michael Smith and After-image by Dennis Scott. He is the author of Is English We Speaking and Other Essays, Making West Indian Literature and, in 2014, Miss Lou: Louise Bennett and Jamaican Culture.

John Hegley, well-known for the comedy element of his verse – a trait also evident in Morris’s witty writing – shares with both poets the power to elevate the most ordinary of subjects to another level, evoking emotions from joy to grief and everything in between. He is seen as ‘the people’s poet’ laureate for his use of everyday language which takes verse to people of all classes and ages.

Mimi Khalvati was born in Iran and brought up on the Isle of Wight; she represented Iran in the 2012 Poetry Parnassus as part of the Cultural Olympiad. She focuses on the smallest details in her work, playing on the tension between her British and Persian poetic influences; in doing so she challenges notions of form and of language itself as she moves between places and cultures.