Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will feature at the next Cellar Bards spoken word event this Friday, 9 June.

She will read a selection of her work at the Cellar Bar, Quay Street, Cardigan, to make the Cellar Bards eleventh birthday an extra special celebration.

Doors and the bar open at 7.30pm. Entry is £3, and open mic spots are available – just sign up on the door by 8pm.

Co-organiser of the event, poet Jackie Biggs said: “We are of course delighted that the foremost poet in Wales can join us to help us celebrate eleven years of delivering top quality spoken word to our community. Gillian has inspired many of us to write and to perform our work over the years and this will be an amazing evening.”

Gillian Clarke, who lives in Ceredigion, was National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016, she is President of Tŷ Newydd, the national writing centre.

She was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010 and the First Minister’s Special St David’s Award earlier this year.

Her tenth collection of poems, ‘The Silence’, is due out in Spring 2024. Her publications include ‘Selected Poems’ (Picador 2016), ‘Zoology’, (Carcanet, 2017); ‘Roots Home’, essays and a journal, (Carcanet, 2021); a pamphlet, ‘The Hours’, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. In 2021 Faber published her version of Aneirin’s 7th century Welsh poem, ‘Y Gododdin’, as a bilingual text. She lives in Ceredigion where, in 2019, six acres were planted with native woodland.

The Cellar Bards welcome writers of poetry, short stories, micro-fiction and novels to the open mic (max five minutes each). People who want to read can put their names down at the door on the night. Or go along to listen to Gillian Clarke, plus a variety of spoken word performances from the talented regulars.

See The Cellar Bards Facebook page or Twitter for more information.