In this longer-than-usual podcast from 2013, Jennifer Williams talks to Kay Ryan, American poet, educator and 16th United States Poet Laureate. Kay was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, among many other awards and accolades.

She was in Edinburgh to read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of a tour including Snape Maltings Concert Hall in Aldeburgh and Dromineer Literature Festival. Before Jennifer and Kay headed out to conquer Arthur’s Seat and to sample Kay’s very first can of Irn-Bru, they read and discussed a number of poems from Kay’s Odd Blocks-Selected and New Poems (Carcanet). They also talked about such varied topics as Buddhism, cycling across America, ‘cool’ poetry, the ticklish delights of rhyme and much more.

Jennifer Williams talks with Griffin Award Winning Canadian poet Ken Babstock about ‘the thingyness of things’, Paul Muldoon, the weather, Canadian garrison mentality’s effect on the work of Canadian writers and much more, including his own extraordinary poems. This interview is from StAnza 2013, and takes place in a tiny attic room at the top of the Town Hall, in the midst of all sorts of weather.

Ken Babstock’s 2011 collection, Methodist Hatchet (Anansi) won The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry and was a finalist for The Trillium Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

Image: Ken Babstock, Toronto by Steve McLaughlin, under a Creative Content licence

In this 2014 podcast Jennifer Williams talks to two Hawthornden Fellows: Lynn Davidson and Alyson Hallett about where they come from, loneliness versus aloneness, and their current and upcoming work.

Lynn Davidson’s fiction and poetry has appeared in journals and her short fiction has been broadcast on national radio. Davidson has received several grants and fellowships to develop her work, including the 2003 Louis Johnson New Writers’ Bursary from Creative New Zealand. She has published collections of poetry, and her novel Ghost Net was released in 2003. Davidson also works as an educator and tutors short fiction and poetry both online and in the classroom.

Alyson Hallett‘s work spans different continents and art forms. She has a poem carved into Milsom Street pavement in Bath, words etched into glass in a library in Bristol, and she runs the international poetry and public art project The Migration Habits of Stones. She currently works as a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. Prior to this, she was a Leverhulme-funded poet-in-residence in the University of Exeter’s Geography Department. In 2010, she completed a practice-based PhD in Poetry and Geographical Intimacy. She lives in Falmouth, Cornwall. Suddenly Everything is her second full volume of poetry.

The Lynne Davidson photo is by Murray Wilson. The Alyson Hallett photo is by Paul Wilkinson.