About this Event
Join SOAS Library for a poetry reading and conversation with award-winning Scottish poet and SOAS graduate Stewart Sanderson. Sanderson will read poems from his latest collection, Weathershaker, as well as sharing new work.
‘Weathershaker, of unknown meaning’
[Scottish National Dictionary]
Weathershaker begins with meanings lost, recovered and imagined. Digging into the material and textual record through place names, fictional histories, translations and fragmentary texts, Sanderson’s second full-length collection speaks of the past from an unsteady present. In a small country of big winds and shifting light, where the weather itself is shaken by our actions as a species, these poems turn towards a contingent future while seeking meaning gone astray.
Testimonials
“In this playful, engaging collection, Sanderson displays his natural gift for bringing the life back into words and the words back into life. His poems seethe with a mischievous intelligence – whether it’s a poem generator, a handful of secrets from the God of Silence, or the nine mysterious definitions of the eponymous Weathershaker, he fuses skill, imagination and a ruthless intelligence into something quite unforgettable.” – John Glenday
“Stewart Sanderson is one of the best younger poets writing in Scotland today and this brilliant new book demonstrates an enviable fluency across poems that deploy both formal and experimental approaches with great aplomb. Here, a firmness of utterance meets a syntactic delicacy that gives voice to the traces left by the ancient peoples who have worked and curated the land before us. In Sanderson’s hands the beauty of carefully observed natural worlds both ghosts and is ghosted by human scripts that the poet ingeniously translates and pieces together for us in acts of fine, lyrical reclamation. A stunning collection.” – David Kinloch
About the speaker
Stewart Sanderson is a poet from Glasgow, who has published and performed widely in the UK and internationally. He is the author of the pamphlets Fios (2015) and An Offering (2018), as well as the book-length collections The Sleep Road (2021) and Weathershaker (2025) – all published by Tapsalteerie. Three times shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, his work has also been recognised by accolades including an Eric Gregory Award and Robert Louis Stevenson and Jessie Kesson Fellowships.Above all, he is a proud SOAS alumnus and feels that his writing's preoccupations of language, culture, translation and the possibility of communication, as well as the ways in which the things we make both do and don't endure, are very reflective of the qualities and curiosities which drew him to Akkadian seminars at SOAS in the first place.
Event venue & nearby stays
SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, London, United Kingdom
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