Our next monthly meeting takes place at 8 pm on Tuesday 20th May at the Royal Wells Hotel in Tunbridge Wells.
Acclaimed poet Ella Frears will announce the poems she has selected for our annual Folio publication. This annual competition is for Kent & Sussex Poetry Society members only, and the judge’s decisions are eagerly awaited. From among the selected poems, Ella will also choose a winning poem – whose author will hold the Keith Francis Bowl for 2025 – and a number of commended poems. Afterwards, she will read from a selection of her own work.
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. Goodlord, (Rough Trade Books, 2024) her more recent hybrid work, which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the Sky Arts Awards’ Times Breakthrough Artist of the Year.
In 2022, Ella was Poet in Residence for the Dartington Trust’s grade II listed Gardens. She is a trustee and editor for Magma Poetry and has been Poet in Residence for the National Trust, Tate Britain, The John Hansard Gallery, K6 Gallery, SPUD (the Observatory), conservation organisation Back from the Brink, and was poet in residence at Royal Holloway University physics department, writing about the Cassini Space Mission.
Her collaborative installation with artist Ben Sanderson, The Six Pillars of Modernism, was on show at Tate St.Ives 2017-18, and Ella’s poems about the St Ives Modernists have also been displayed at Tate St Ives and the Barbara Hepworth Museum & Garden.
Ella has taught poetry and creative writing for City Lit, as an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths University, as a Guest Lecturer for Falmouth University, and University East London, as well as running freelance workshops for various spaces and organisations including Arvon, the Guardian, the Poetry School, the Poetry Society, Kew Gardens, Dartington, and Spread the Word.
In 2023 Ella was Creative Fellow at Exeter University working with the Maritime Environmental History Department.
She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow for the Courtauld Institute of Art, and hosts chat and music show Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 