Jane Hirshfield in conversation with John McAuliffe at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation

Blackwell’s are delighted to partner with The University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing and Poetry Ireland to welcome Jane Hirshfield to Manchester. Join us at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to hear Jane read from and discuss her collection The Asking with John McAuliffe.

Tickets are £4 or admission is free when purchasing a Book & Ticket option.

Please note that online ticket sales will end at 5pm on the 27th April, thereafter tickets will be able to be purchased on the door.

About the author

Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations of our shared and borrowed lives, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. In an era of algorithm, assertion and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness.

Jane, born in New York City and a longtime resident of northern California, has published eleven books of poetry, most recently The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2024), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This draws upon books including her earlier UK retrospective, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), and four subsequent collections published by Bloodaxe in the UK: After (2006), Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and Ledger (2020). After was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays on poetry’s deep workings, and the editor of four co-translated books presenting world poets from the deep past, and has long been one of American poetry’s foremost environmental advocates. Her honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Center Book Award and the California Book Award. A book of her Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise, was published by Bloodaxe in 2008.

Thanks are due to Poetry Ireland and to Jane Hirshfield’s UK publishers Bloodaxe Books for enabling her to travel from northern California to Dublin and Manchester to read from her book.