Poetry Upstairs at The Melville Centre for the Arts

2024 Reading Series

Tuesday  30th April 7pm                                                 £5 Entry

John Barnie                          Simone Mansell Broome           Nigel Jarret

(Aberystwyth)                       (Carmarthen)                            Abergavenny)

John Barnie was born and raised in Abergavenny. He taught at Copenhagen University (1969-82), and was editor of the cultural magazine Planet: The Welsh Internationalist (1990-2006). A poet and essayist, his latest books are Tsunami Days (essays) and Dunes of Cwm Rheidol (poems). He is also a blues guitarist and has played in a number of bands, including Y Bechgyn Drwg/The Bad Boys with Twm Morys, Iwan Llwyd and Nigel Jenkins.

Simone Mansell Broome is a Welsh-born writer. She studied English with American Studies at Sussex University, qualified both as a teacher of Speech and Drama and of EFL Simone’s poems have been read on Radio 4, including BBC’s ‘Poetry Please’, ITV and Radio Wales. Fifty of Simone’s poems were translated into Romanian in 2020 as part of a Bucharest University M.A. dissertation.   She has published three full collections of poetry.

Nigel Jarrett is the author of eight books. His first poetry collection, Miners At The Quarry Pool, was published by Parthian. This year Cockatrice Books published his second poetry collection, Gwyriad. Nigel Jarrett is a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize for short fiction and the inaugural Templar Shorts Prize. For many years, he was chief music critic of the South Wales Argus.

He reviews poetry for Acumen magazine and also writes for Jazz Journal (a regular column called Count Me In), Wales Arts Review.