Thursday 6th Feb
6.30-9pm
Join us to celebrate GOODLORD by Ella Frears with Ella Frears and Kieran Goddard.
Goodlord is a fierce, dark, funny and unique novel-in-verse. Through a series of increasingly excoriating emails to her estate agent Ava, our narrator lets out her mounting rage against the maddening and many indignities of her present situation.
She tells Ava about the claustrophobic school days that haunt her still; about her underpaid exploitative jobs; about an artists residency that offers her the space she craves - but demands a complicated transaction in return. She describes the exhausting work of trying to navigate a world where landlords lay claim to her pay checks and men lay claim her body. All she wants is a home, a place of safety and control - but each step forward is met with relentless setbacks.
Written in sharp, unflinching prose, Goodlord exposes the grinding inequalities of modern life. It is a blistering exploration of what it means to live in a world where everything, including your dignity, comes with a price tag.
Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her latest pamphlet I AM THE MOTHER CAT written as part of her residency at John Hansard Gallery is out with Rough Trade Books (2021). In 2022, Ella was named first ever Poet in Residence for the Dartington Trust's grade II listed Gardens, selected by Alice Oswald. Ella has had poetry published in the London Review of Books, the Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Ambit, The Rialto, and the Moth among others. In 2023 Ella was Creative Fellow at Exeter University working with the Maritime Environmental History Department, and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow for the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Keiran Goddard grew up in Shard End, Birmingham in a working-class family. He is the author of one poetry pamphlet, two full-length poetry collections and the novel Hourglass. His debut collection was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Prize, he was the runner up in the William Blake Prize and Hourglass was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott prize. He speaks internationally on issues related to social change and currently produces research on workers' rights, the future of work, automation and trade unionism.