https://carolinebird.co.uk/events daily 0.75 2026-03-04 https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/residential-writing-course-starting-to-write-play-with-words-to-find-your-own-voice monthly 0.5 2026-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1768824851983-L8JDHRUGWLF09K2FI9AJ/Arvon.png Events - Residential Writing Course: Starting to Write - Play with words to find your own voice - Make it stand out Residential Writing Course: Starting to Write - Play with words to find your own voice Do you feel wary when you sit down to write? Perhaps the instrument of writing feels new and strange. In 1975, Keith Jarrett found himself on stage at the Köln Opera House, sitting at the wrong piano. Instead of his requested Imperial Concert Grand, he had a small one in poor condition with faulty pedals – on which he then played the best-selling record of his career. This course will be all about playing, slamming pen to paper and joyfully experimenting with words that disrupt and surprise – ourselves as well as the reader. Join award winning tutors Caroline Bird and Mark Haddon as they help you take risks, forget the distinctions between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction, and guide you to find your own sound. With the support of your fellow writers, you’ll find a language which fits your way of thinking and feeling. If that language, and the world it describes, are a complete surprise, all the better. We’ll all share our work and, in hearing how a piece changes a room, we’ll learn to listen to our own writing and understand how it works. By the end of the week you’ll find it easier to put yourself in the shoes of that imaginary stranger, the reader, and edit you work to make their experience richer and more vivid. And you’ll have a bulging folder of work to go away and build on. What to Expect: • Group workshops: These will involve talks from your tutors and exercises to expand your writing, the results of which we’ll share in a supportive environment • Personal Feedback: Focused 1:1 sessions with inspiring tutors for constructive feedback on your work • Quiet time: in which you can work on the pieces you have begun in the workshops • Community: Share meals and workshops with a supportive group • A final evening: on which we all share and celebrate the best work from the week • On departure day: you’ll leave feeling inspired and full of ideas. You’ll have a better understanding of your own voice, of what you can say and how you might best say it. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/love-and-terror monthly 0.5 2026-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/f70e9a41-696a-4961-ad4f-0739f9e8fabb/Loveandterror1.png Events - Love and Terror - a week long online writing retreat with Caroline Bird and Rachel Long - Make it stand out LOVE AND TERROR ‘The poem carries love and terror, or it carries nothing’ - Jane Hirshfield. What makes a poem haunt us long after its read? Join poets Caroline Bird and Rachel Long for a week-long writing retreat devoted to writing LOVE AND TERROR. Together, we’ll explore how poems hold tenderness and dread in the same breath, how intimacy can tip into unease, how beauty can destabilise, and how an ending can open a trapdoor beneath the reader. We’ll study poets who balance vulnerability and strangeness with chaos and control, including Lucia Perillo, Marie Howe, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Jack Underwood, and Ralph Edison. We’ll also borrow from director David Lynch’s uncanny film classics to examine atmosphere, dislocation, and the power of a deeply unsettling ending. Through generative prompts, close reading, lively discussions, and your one-to-one tutorials, you’ll learn how to build emotional tension without melodrama and how to destabilize a poem – structurally, tonally, imagistically. Expect strange exercises, risky drafts, and the thrill of pushing your work into unexpected places. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/residential-writing-course-poetry-thawing-creative-blocks monthly 0.5 2026-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1768824851983-L8JDHRUGWLF09K2FI9AJ/Arvon.png Events - Residential Writing Course: Poetry: Thawing creative blocks - Make it stand out The Hurst, The John Osborne Arvon Writing House Residential Writing Course: Poetry Thawing creative blocks Tutors Caroline Bird & Romalyn Ante Guest Speaker Kostya Tsolakis Date Monday January 26th - Saturday January 31st 2026 Location The Hurst ‘and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.’ Kim Addonizio Join award-winning writers Caroline Bird and Romalyn Ante in the depths of winter for an energising and playful week which will thaw your creative blocks and set you on a stronger path with your writing in 2026. If you’re feeling stuck, and unsure of how to take your poetry forwards, this week will give you the clarity, confidence and practical tools to move forwards. You’ll confront your blocks head-on, delving into what makes your poetic voice unique and learning how you might harness that power to greatest effect. You’ll leave with a notebook bursting with fresh drafts — and, if you’re working on a poetry pamphlet or collection, the direction and momentum to complete it. Over the week, you will: • Focus on ways to move past mental blocks, spark fresh ideas, and rediscover the joy and momentum of writing. • Take practical steps forward with your poetry – whether through small, steady progress or surprising breakthroughs – empowering yourself to create without fear or doubt. • Enjoy exercises and playful prompts that loosen up writing, and practical strategies for transforming blocks into inspiration. • Spend some time thinking of the hopes and dreams you might have for your poetry over the year, as winter itself is an important period for reflection, stillness and renewal. • Join other poets to share ideas and support each other – during what can be a solitary time of year – as a community of writers. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/hyperfocus-parents monthly 0.5 2026-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/34acc5c0-f70e-46c6-929e-3453accf718f/Hyperfocus_Parents.png Events - HYPERFOCUS - PARENTS, 3-4 February 2026 (online workshops: Tues 7-9PM UK) - Make it stand out Parents - February 2026 3–24 FEBRUARY 2026 TUTORS: CAROLINE BIRD, JACK UNDERWOOD WORKSHOPS: TUES 7-9PM UK How do you write about a problematic parent(s)? How best could you navigate a complex upbringing? How do you handle the sheer awe and panic of being a new parent? How do you write about the loss of a parent? In this second segment of Hyperfocus, join poets Caroline Bird and Jack Underwood as they look at ways we can write poems that draw from the multilayered experiences of having parents and being a parent. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/the-last-stand-of-mrs-mary-whitehouse monthly 0.5 2026-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/55c8f899-da02-4673-9b17-8cbeeac05ea6/The_Last_Stand_of+Mrs_Mary_Whitehouse.png Events - The last stand of Mrs Mary Whitehouse - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/stanza-poetry-festival monthly 0.5 2025-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1736418067241-432NPJ3ASAQDMG4II4GA/Stanza.png Events - Stanza Poetry Festival - StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, returns to St Andrews from 14-16 March 2025, marking the beginning of a new era under Artistic Director Ryan Van Winkle. The festival will showcase poets from Scotland, the UK, and beyond, with a fresh creative direction evident from the opening night. Continuing its hybrid format, StAnza will feature livestreams and digital exclusives, enabling global audiences and artists to participate. https://stanzapoetry.org/festival/headliners-2025/ https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/event-two-nhmtc-hmxfe monthly 0.5 2025-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/6a919eda-50ba-46d5-890c-b3555ab08b1a/MedwayRiverLitLogo.png Events - Medway River Lit - Medway River Lit Caroline Bird headlined Medway River Lit 2024, an eco-conscious festival in November focused on climate change. As patron, Bird closed the event, showcasing her Forward Prize-winning career. Highlights included talks by Ben Okri and Bill McGuire, Friday Nights at Poetry Republic featuring poets like The Four Poets and Martin Figura with Helen Ivory, and a Big Trouble spoken word takeover with Richard Scott. https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/festival-gala-reading-with-caroline-bird-and-imtiaz-dharker monthly 0.5 2025-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1726047084636-RMR2ZG7Q63FQG1S06U5Z/PoetryAldeburgh.png Events - FESTIVAL GALA READING WITH CAROLINE BIRD AND IMTIAZ DHARKER - Poetry in Aldeburgh Festival 2024 - FESTIVAL GALA READING WITH CAROLINE BIRD AND IMTIAZ DHARKER Caroline Bird and Imtiaz Dharker delivered readings from their recent collections in an event co-sponsored by Aldeburgh Cinema. Simon Armitage praised Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake as "spring-loaded, funny, sad, deadly," while Jackie Kay described Dharker’s Shadow Reader as "witty, wise, profound, and moving." https://carolinebird.co.uk/events/event-two-nhmtc monthly 0.5 2025-01-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1726053706568-TC9OLO68577MCVJPHJG2/PushTheBoatOutLogo.png Events - Push the boat out: Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival - Push the boat out: Edinburgh’s International Poetry Festival Push the Boat Out returned to Summerhall from 22-24 November with a vibrant celebration of language. The festival featured poetry readings, music, dance, workshops, and unique events like poetic cocktail-making, offering something for everyone and showcasing the many ways words shape our lives. https://carolinebird.co.uk/about daily 0.75 2026-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/4fe7a8aa-3642-4491-bf1a-c5e480bc0907/CarolineBird_Library1.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119258865-QXWUQEE3ES5M9A0OCLB6/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.28.19.jpg About - AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE (2024) Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.' 'Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119286062-BX9L5TZ8J1Y5I0NKC8O3/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.30.23.jpg About - RED ELLEN (2022) 'A working-class woman inside the walls of Westminster? If that is not espionage, I do not know what is.' Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world. Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction. And yet – despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers – she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in. Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119296845-MAFGZUV1X2VB93TWOI3G/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.28.40.jpg About - THE AIR YEAR (2020) Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021 Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020 A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020) A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 A Guardian Book of the Year 2020 The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119325606-97DOCC34BHVJZ0ZMRTFT/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.30.45.jpg About - IN THESE DAYS OF PROHIBITION (2017) Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, 'revving on a wish'. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119365336-OP6A77JC6LO1WLSSLMEL/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.06.jpg About - THE HAT-STAND UNION (2013) Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119375968-VX9ZF9HC1445CEMMNIPX/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B14.11.41.jpg About - CHAMBER PIECE (2013) In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong? ‘ an assured, funny and twisty script by the young poet and playwright Caroline Bird…. It leaves you reeling’ – The Times ‘an extended Orton-esque style joke on the theme of crime and punishment…. There is fun and plenty of provocation before this show gives the subject the philosophical and emotional underpinning it demands’ – Guardian ‘Bird writes with a fearless wit’ – Independent ‘compelling, grimly gripping….' Sunday Express https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119393780-6ZSSA3S5EH77WKJD00U9/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.29.38.jpg About - THE TROJAN WOMEN (2012) A modern-day version of Euripides' anti-war play, The Trojan Women has been rewritten and is set in a mother-and-baby unit of a prison. The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its people burn. Inside the prison, the citys captive women await their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen, whilst the pregnant Chorus is shackled to her bed. But their grief at what has been before will soon be drowned out by the horror of what is to come, as the Greek lust for vengeance consumes everything man, woman and baby in its path. This caustic and radical new version of Euripides classic tragedy comes from one of the UKs most exciting young poets, Caroline Bird. It is an intense, gripping look at what happens when the world collapses. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119417844-HVK581ASZ4NPKVW238GJ/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.27.jpg About - WATERING CAN (2009) Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, "Watering Can" has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119443081-IH0USZ0AY1OSYMZMXG7S/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.29.57.jpg About - TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP (2006) Following "Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake, and the turnip. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119484973-3S1FHDCVJ0MDOLGB0Z8P/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.51.jpg About - LOOKING THROUGH LETTERBOXES (2002) Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness. Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations communicate and fail to agree. https://carolinebird.co.uk/home daily 1.0 2026-03-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/df9f075a-e923-405f-93ae-1e39112344c9/CarolineBirdForwardPrize.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1744626878555-0HE892E923Y7A0HZ2WCW/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.28.19.jpg Home - AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE (2024) Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.' 'Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118259817-9PYOGYPZ2Q1VVRR1PYJ0/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.28.40.jpg Home - THE AIR YEAR (2020) Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021 Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020 A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020) A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 A Guardian Book of the Year 2020 The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118274155-K3WB312GNO779LIUNAIG/Rookie_Caroline_Bird.jpg Home - ROOKIE (2022) Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023 Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118784783-GRHT8G0RVX2AWD49N0GE/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.30.23.jpg Home - RED ELLEN (2022) 'A working-class woman inside the walls of Westminster? If that is not espionage, I do not know what is.' Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world. Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction. And yet – despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers – she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in. Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118316583-U1NUH96RRS1ULN8GHH40/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.30.45.jpg Home - IN THESE DAYS OF PROHIBITION Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, 'revving on a wish'. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118327956-7MNS7DMB2LISYSXOJM3N/The%2BWonderful%2BWizard%2Bof%2BOz%25C2%25A0.jpg Home - THE WONDER WIZARD OF OZ RE-IMAGINED. RE-TWISTED An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches, where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a mouse can blow your head off. In just one day, this little girl revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour. Her name is DOROTHY. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118678503-C7ZKJHEI2WAAUX39JSL2/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.31.06.jpg Home - THE HAT-STAND UNION (2013) Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118350440-A4BMZNRRAZ1T7USTOTGU/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B14.11.41.jpg Home - CHAMBER PIECE (2013) In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong? ‘ an assured, funny and twisty script by the young poet and playwright Caroline Bird…. It leaves you reeling’ – The Times ‘an extended Orton-esque style joke on the theme of crime and punishment…. There is fun and plenty of provocation before this show gives the subject the philosophical and emotional underpinning it demands’ – Guardian ‘Bird writes with a fearless wit’ – Independent ‘compelling, grimly gripping….' Sunday Express https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118363389-BQIZ59MLDCX7SRG5GFT7/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.29.38.jpg Home - THE TROJAN WOMEN (2012) A modern-day version of Euripides' anti-war play, The Trojan Women has been rewritten and is set in a mother-and-baby unit of a prison. The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its people burn. Inside the prison, the citys captive women await their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen, whilst the pregnant Chorus is shackled to her bed. But their grief at what has been before will soon be drowned out by the horror of what is to come, as the Greek lust for vengeance consumes everything man, woman and baby in its path. This caustic and radical new version of Euripides classic tragedy comes from one of the UKs most exciting young poets, Caroline Bird. It is an intense, gripping look at what happens when the world collapses. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118714944-SQ1W7RD1RWEYH5RADJJ1/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.31.27.jpg Home - WATERING CAN (2009) Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, "Watering Can" has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118534015-V2VJKZLZFIKIIWNNS1LK/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.29.57.jpg Home - TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP (2006) Following "Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake, and the turnip. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118571770-AMJQN13L2UAP9FAF645E/Screenshot%252B2024-07-23%252Bat%252B12.31.51.jpg Home - LOOKING THROUGH LETTERBOXES (2002) Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness. Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations communicate and fail to agree. https://carolinebird.co.uk/poetry daily 0.75 2026-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118850877-D1JT094FYPFO0SR1GTS4/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.28.19.jpg Poetry - AMBUSH AT STILL LAKE (2024) Caroline Bird's new poems show us the ambush of real life that occurs in the stillness after the happy ending. This is a collection about marriage, lesbian parenthood, addiction and recovery in which a recurring dream is playing out: a world where mums impale themselves on pogo-sticks, serial killers rattle around in basements, baby monitors are haunted by someone else's baby and, through it all, love stays and stays like a stationary rollercoaster that turns out to be the scariest, most thrilling ride in the amusement park. Her editor welcomed the book in these terms: 'It is bleak, repellent and hilarious in an American Psycho-ish way. Hectic and vivid.' 'Vegetable crisps. The words yawn like a black hole, sucking my eyes backwards into my head until I see my own brain glowing like a radioactive cauliflower.' https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118861607-H2TDZNNGOPMWWGKVJ2F8/Rookie_Caroline_Bird.jpg Poetry - ROOKIE (2022) Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2023 Caroline Bird is one of Carcanet's most popular poets. Her startling instinct for metaphor, the courage of her choice of subjects and the integrity of her witness, set her apart: a poem is a risk, and it has to be a risk worth taking for the poet and for the reader. Starting with Looking through Letterboxes in 2002 when she was fifteen years old, she has published six Carcanet books, culminating in The Air Year which was awarded the Forward Prize in 2020, shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize, and a Book of the Year in the Telegraph, Guardian and White Review. Rookie presents a formidable body of work composed over two decades from one of the poetry world's most energetic and consistently compelling voices. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118890243-L4ZZ07JCVQAJL2X247E6/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.28.40.jpg Poetry - THE AIR YEAR (2020) Shortlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2021 Winner of the 2020 Forward Prize for Best Collection Shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2020 A Telegraph Poetry Book of the Month (February 2020) A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020 A Guardian Book of the Year 2020 The Air Year is a time of flight, transition and suspension: signatures scribbled on the sky. Bird's speakers exist in a state of unrest, trapped in a liminal place between take-off and landing, undeniably lost. Love is uncontrollable, joy comes and goes at hurricane speed. They walk to the cliff edge, close their eyes and step out into the air. Caroline Bird has five previous collections published by Carcanet. Her fifth collection, In These Days of Prohibition, was shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize and the Ted Hughes Award. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118906226-88FAG1L2LGN5K83FI4G5/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.30.45.jpg Poetry - IN THESE DAYS OF PROHIBITION (2017) Shortlisted for the 2017 Ted Hughes Award. Shortlisted for the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize. In These Days of Prohibition is Caroline Bird's fifth Carcanet collection. As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, 'revving on a wish'. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118939826-8PV0LPYRYZV2FKPXPWSU/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.06.jpg Poetry - THE HAT-STAND UNION (2013) Playful in earnest, Caroline Bird in her fourth book of poems turns familiar stories on their heads. Adrift in a surreal world of the everyday, Bird's protagonists declaim Chekhov in supermarkets, purchase mail-order tears, sing love-songs to hat-stands. At the centre of the collection Bird evokes the sinister side of Camelot, haunted by the experiments of its crazed tyrant-king. Bird's characters and voices are at once savvy and vulnerable; underlying the exuberance is empathy with those who have lost themselves somewhere along the way. The everyday world of The Hat-Stand Union is beautiful, ominous and full of surprise. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118964324-KE8IBE5GAF49CX91E9FU/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.27.jpg Poetry - WATERING CAN (2009) Caroline Bird's two earlier collections were acclaimed for their exuberant energy, surreal imagination and passion - 'a bit of a Howl for a new generation', wrote the "Hudson Review". "Watering Can" celebrates life as an early twenty-something. The poems, writes Caroline Bird, 'contain prophetic videos, a moon colonised by bullies, weeping scholars, laughing ducks, silent weddings - all the fertiliser that pours on top of your head.' The extraordinary verve and compassion of her verse propels us into the anxiety of new responsibilities. Raw but never hopeless, "Watering Can" has comedy, wordplay and bright self-deprecation. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737118988719-QMIVW75KK7HT086938FG/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.29.57.jpg Poetry - TROUBLE CAME TO THE TURNIP (2006) Following "Looking Through Letterboxes", her first collection (2002), Caroline Bird was acclaimed as a vivid and precocious new talent. "Trouble Came to the Turnip" confirms her originality as she strikes out again in new directions, taking nothing for granted. Her poems are ferociously vital, fantastical, sometimes violent, almost always savagely humorous and self-mocking. Caroline Bird's world is inhabited by failed and (less often) successful relationships, by the dizzying crisis of early adulthood, by leprechauns and spells and Miss Pringle's seven lovely daughters waiting to spring out of a cardboard cake, and the turnip. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119017804-HXQ8I7EJ5GFZPKJY4WN3/Screenshot%2B2024-07-23%2Bat%2B12.31.51.jpg Poetry - LOOKING THROUGH LETTERBOXES (2002) Caroline Bird at first appears to be a traditional story-teller. But the stories she tells are suspended, charged with metaphor, and built upon foundations strangely familiar: fairy tale, fantasy and the sweet-bitter world of romance. The further one reads in her haunted tales, the more remarkable becomes the variety of forms, metres and rhythms she uses, and the clearer their appropriateness. Things are not ever as they seem, and the poems bring us closer to how the world 'really' is for this talented teenager. They work metaphorically through our expectations and prejudices, which she rearranges and reanimates ('with a step/in your dance, a forecast for lightning'), or those that relate to the world of childhood ('I came to see if you were okay') where language itself has never quite got a grip. In the poems of Caroline Bird gender politics are starkly redefined, as are the languages with which generations communicate and fail to agree. https://carolinebird.co.uk/plays daily 0.75 2026-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119076455-4HZDBDLK0EUWXEDS1N15/Red%2BEllen.jpg Plays - RED ELLEN (2022) 'A working-class woman inside the walls of Westminster? If that is not espionage, I do not know what is.' Forever on the right side of history, but on the wrong side of life, Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson is caught between revolutionary and parliamentary politics as she fights for a better world. Battling to save Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany; campaigning for Britain to aid the fight against Franco's Fascists in Spain; leading two hundred workers in the Jarrow Crusade against unemployment and poverty... she pursues each cause with a passionate, reckless conviction. And yet – despite a life spent running into the likes of Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway, serving in Churchill's cabinet, having affairs with communist spies and government ministers – she still finds herself, somehow, on the outside looking in. Caroline Bird's play Red Ellen is the remarkable true story of an inspiring and brilliant woman. It was first produced by Northern Stage, Nottingham Playhouse and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2022. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119155816-GDNER2WRJF8CAOVDYYE2/The%252BWonderful%252BWizard%252Bof%252BOz%2525C2%2525A0.jpg Plays - THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (2015) RE-IMAGINED. RE-TWISTED An angry orphan escapes a grey town on the back of a hurricane. She lands in a mysterious country of tiny people and wicked witches, where the trees carry bazookas, the crows recite slam poetry, and a mouse can blow your head off. In just one day, this little girl revolutionizes an entire nation. She brings freedom, and colour. Her name is DOROTHY. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119102367-XUAFQTDMWGE2NWN9TKO4/Chamber%2BPiece.jpg Plays - CHAMBER PIECE (2013) In this pitch-black comedy, fatal chemicals combine with ruthless ambition, biscuits, bureaucracy and moral ambiguity. Set in the near future, Britain has reinstated the death penalty. Relatives are weeping in the witness gallery, the journalist clicks her pen and the prison governor gives the thumbs up. Rapist murderer Richard Sanger is strapped to the gurney. Chamber Piece depicts a modern, British execution. How would it look? How would we feel? And what could possibly go wrong? ‘ an assured, funny and twisty script by the young poet and playwright Caroline Bird…. It leaves you reeling’ – The Times ‘an extended Orton-esque style joke on the theme of crime and punishment…. There is fun and plenty of provocation before this show gives the subject the philosophical and emotional underpinning it demands’ – Guardian ‘Bird writes with a fearless wit’ – Independent ‘compelling, grimly gripping….' Sunday Express https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1737119114407-PCCH92XGCXCPR49AAEW7/The%2BTrojan%2BWomen.jpg Plays - THE TROJAN WOMEN (2012) A modern-day version of Euripides' anti-war play, The Trojan Women has been rewritten and is set in a mother-and-baby unit of a prison. The war is over. Beyond the prison walls, Troy and its people burn. Inside the prison, the citys captive women await their fate. Stalking the antiseptic confines of its mother and baby unit is Hecuba, the fallen Trojan queen, whilst the pregnant Chorus is shackled to her bed. But their grief at what has been before will soon be drowned out by the horror of what is to come, as the Greek lust for vengeance consumes everything man, woman and baby in its path. This caustic and radical new version of Euripides classic tragedy comes from one of the UKs most exciting young poets, Caroline Bird. It is an intense, gripping look at what happens when the world collapses. https://carolinebird.co.uk/mentoring daily 0.75 2026-02-03 https://carolinebird.co.uk/contact daily 0.75 2026-02-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669f719a6632cf1c6120e342/1784ac4f-5bf2-42b1-8e31-d87746e9d8a3/Caroline_Bird_cover.jpg https://carolinebird.co.uk/workshops daily 0.75 2026-02-03