Join award-winning poet Ben Verinder for a nature-themed poetry writing workshop at Wordsworth Grasmere.

This immersive workshop will explore ways in which to write constructively about the natural world at a time when it is so vulnerable. Participants will explore and discuss the many ways in which nature can be portrayed in a poem and look at poetic technique, content and form.

The session is open to all, from enthusiastic beginners to seasoned writers. Participants will discuss a selection of poems and extracts and have a go at a series of short writing exercises. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided.

Ben will also be reading from his new collection How to Save a River at Wordsworth Grasmere in the evening of Saturday 13 September.

About How to Save a River

How to Save a River by Ben Verinder is the winning portfolio of the Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year Prize 2024 – 2025. It is a celebration of those who revive and restore rivers, as well as a meditation on addiction and grief. This pamphlet asks how we can save what we have, and how we can mend our relationship with what has gone.

‘These are moving and surprising poems. They lament the degradation of river habitats whilst elegising, too, the loss of a parent. We visit a fire in Cyprus, becks and rivers in the Lake District and the US. Animals of water swim through much of the pamphlet: eels, smolts, efts, crayfish, the salamander. Among this burgeoning life, the strange face of loss is never far from sight. This means that the poems achieve a lovely, multifaceted evocation of human interactions with the life of water, an element from which, finally, strength, comfort and no small degree of hope are drawn.’ – Judges

About Ben Verinder

Ben Verinder lives in rural Hertfordshire. He holds an MA in Writing Poetry from The Poetry School and Newcastle University. He is the 2024/5 Michael Marks Environmental Poet of the Year.

His poems have been published widely, including in The Rialto, Stand, Lighthouse, The North, Black Iris, And Other Poems, and Wild Court. His debut pamphlet, Botanicals, was published by Frosted Fire in 2021 and his second, We Lost The Birds, by Nine Pens in 2023.

In 2022 Ben won the Bournemouth International Writing Prize and his poems have won, been shortlisted for, or commended in, a wide variety of competitions. In 2023 he was commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations to write a poem to mark its 75th anniversary. He has previously worked and lived in Cumbria and is the biographer of the Cumbrian adventurer and writer Mary Burkett.