Saturday 9 November 1830 - 1930
Join us for an evening of poetry inspired by peatlands, exploring the delicate fronds of human and ecological narratives emerging from the elusive landscapes of bogs. An outstanding line up of poets will draw us into the worlds of soggy flora, moorland myth, submerged lives and environmental drift.
Featuring: Fiona Benson, Melanie Giles, Philippa Johnson, Richard Scott, Clare Shaw, Ben Smith, and John Wedgwood Clarke.

Fiona Benson

Fiona Benson is the author of four poetry collections: Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, Ephemeron and Midden Witch (forthcoming). All three of her published collections have been shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize, and her books have won the Forward Prize, the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She has also written a poetry script Infamous Offspring in collaboration with the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus / Ultima Vez which was performed across Europe. In 2024 she received a Cholmondley Award from the Society of Authors. She is an experienced teacher and performer. She lives in mid-Devon with her husband and their two daughters.

Melanie Giles

Melanie Giles is an archaeologist, specialising in the mortuary rites, material culture and landscapes of the Iron Age. She has worked extensively with museums on displaying and interpreting funerary archaeology, including ‘bog bodies’ and weapons burials. She works co-creatively with artists and poets to find new ways of telling interesting stories about the past and its meaning to contemporary communities. She is a poet and has edited two poetry anthologies ‘Vestiges’ (2021) and ‘Peat’ (2022).

Philippa Johnson

Philippa is a Creative Writing PhD student in her third year at the University of Exeter: with a background in Anglo-Saxon literature & poetics, she completed her MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa during Lockdown. Her thesis focuses on Women With-In the Landscape: The Female Bog Bodies, alongside which will be book of poetry around these individuals & their landscape. She lives and teaches in Somerset.

Richard Scott

Richard Scott’s first book is Soho (Faber & Faber, 2018). His second poetry collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in February 2025.

Ben Smith

Ben is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. He is a novelist and poet, specialising in environmental and speculative literature, focusing on future landscapes, climate change and the Anthropocene. He is author of Doggerland (a Guardian Book of the Year 2019) and Sky Burials (2014).

John Wedgwood Clarke

John Wedgwood Clarke is a poet and prose non-fiction writer. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. His work engages with ecological damage and traces it into the heart of our lives. His collections include Landfill (2017) and Boy Thing (2023). His work as a television presenter for the BBC includes The Books that Made Britain (BBC Four, 2016), Through the Lens of Larkin (BBC Four, 2017) and Cornwall’s Red River (BBC Four, 2022).

‘Bog Talk’ is a RENEW project for the University of Exeter, in collaboration with Natural England and the South West Peatland Partnership, funded by Natural England through the Protected Sites Strategy.
Artwork featured in promotional images is by Rose Ferraby.