Kevin Crossley-Holland Poetry Reading

Join us to hear award winning translator, children’s author and poet Kevin Crossley-Holland, read from his work.

At the heart of this reading is a new cycle of short poems turning on Harald Hardrada (nee Sigurdsson), the greatest warrior of his age, during his formative years as a member of the Varangian Guard in Byzantium.

A man with an imposing physical appearance, ferocious energy, and a sense of destiny, Harald had to learn how to be a leader, and his defects were scarcely fewer than his skills. Brilliantly illustrated by Chris Riddell, these poems are not narratives but passionate, terse and often witty revelations, turning on Harald's engagement with warfare, leadership, love and the contrasts between the values of the glittering, hard-edged northern world, still half in thrall to the Norse gods, and the softer, more seductive south. Above all, they're the words of a young man among men whose lives are in his hands, and on whom his own success and fame depend.

Kevin Crossley-Holland's selected poems, The Mountains of Norfolk, were published in 2015. Arc published his Gravitation for Beginners last year, and he is the author of The Penguin Book of Norse Myths.