Wednesday 10 July 1830 - 1930

We’re delighted to welcome Katrina Naomi to Exeter Custom House for the launch of Battery Rocks.

Battery Rocks is Katrina’s first full poetry collection since the critically acclaimed Wild Persistence (Seren) in 2020. Battery Rocks is a meditation on nature, risk, swimming and the sea. The title refers to a Cornish swimming spot in Katrina’s home town of Penzance.

The new collection includes the poem ‘in the kelp forest’, which won the prestigious Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Katrina returns to swim at the rocks every day for a year. On each swim she finds something fresh and invigorating, whether this is an encounter with a bull seal or a jellyfish, an insight into the conflict in Palestine or the scourge of second homes, or a realisation about herself.

Battery Rocks examines issues of fear, of strength and vulnerability. Katrina writes in response to an attempted rape and other experienced attacks, questioning how she can feel safer alone, in a raging sea in winter, in nothing but a swimming costume, than on dry land. She also approaches the climate emergency from aslant, offering several new takes on one of the most pressing concerns of our times.

About the author

Katrina is an award-winning poet, performer, mentor and judge. Her new poetry collection, Battery Rocks, has received the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors and will be published by Seren in July 2024. Katrina’s previous collections have won an Authors’ Foundation Award and Saboteur Award, and she is a recipient of the Keats-Shelley Prize. Katrina’s poetry has appeared on Poems on the Underground, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Poetry Please, and in The TLS, The Poetry Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths. Katrina lives in Cornwall  www.katrinanaomi.co.uk

This event will be in-person at Exeter Custom House. You can find out more about the accessibility of the Custom House here. If you have any access needs you’d like to discuss with us before the event you can contact us on quaywords@literatureworks.org.uk. We can offer free carer tickets if you need help to support you to attend.