Poetry reading and Q&A with local author Helen Mort. Free but donations welcome. Books for sale.
Helen has published four poetry collections with Chatto & Windus, a novel and an award-winning memoir, 'A Line Above the Sky'. Much of her work investigates the lives of women who have lived boldly, from the illustrated women of tattoo culture to early Victorian era climbers who scaled peaks in impractical skirts. In 2024 Helen published the first biography of Sheffield environmental campaigner and poet Ethel Haythornthwaite, a remarkable and overlooked figure who protected the Peak District and stood up for the countryside in contexts where she was often the only female voice.
Helen's new collection 'STEPMOTHER' examines the myth of the 'wicked' stepmum. Turning a bold and inventive gaze on this neglected dimension of female experience, these are candid dispatches from the shifting terrain of the modern family. As playful as it is moving, STEPMOTHER radiates Mort’s signature empathetic warmth, but with the bite of truth.
Mort interleaves fragments of lyric essay with gothic flights into verse that draw us deep into the woods of upon-a-time, and back, changed, into the now. Groundbreaking and transformative, tender and uncompromising, STEPMOTHER has much to teach us about female power and the fear it still provokes, our openness to change, and the surprising shapes love can take.
'Brave, graceful and absolutely vital - Mort shoulders away the old trope of the stepmother and replaces her with a host of humane women' SARAH HALL, author of Helm
