Glyn Maxwell has long been regarded as one of Britain’s major poets. His books include Pluto, Hide Now, The Sugar Mile, The Nerve, and his recent selected poems, One Thousand Nights and Counting. He has won many awards, including the Somerset Maugham Prize, the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Several of his plays have been staged in the UK and US. He has written several opera libretti, and his novel, Blue Burneau, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize. He has taught at Princeton, Columbia, and New York University, and reviews poetry for The New York Times
Here he gives the keynote address of the poetry symposium, part of the Poetry on the Move festival at the University of Canberra. ‘Dear Derek’ is an elegiac reflection on his friend and mentor Nobel Prize winning poet, Derek Walcott.
This episode hosted by Shane Strange
Sound production by Samuel Byrnand
