Yvonne Reddick (Spoken Label, June 2023)

Today's Spoken Label Podcast (Spoken Word / Poetry Podcast) features our returning friend, Yvonne Reddick.

Yvonne Reddick is an award-winning writer, editor, ecopoetry scholar and climber.

She has received a Leadership Fellowship from the AHRC, the Poetry Society’s inaugural Peggy Poole Award,a Northern Writer’s Award and a Creative Futures Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Guardian Review, Poetry Review and New Statesman, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC North West Tonight.

She has published four pamphlets, including Translating Mountains (Seren, 2017), winner of the Mslexia Women’s Pamphlet Competition, and Spikenard (Laureate’sChoice, 2019), which was a poetry recommendation in the London Review of Books.

Our chat today covers mostly her first book length collection, Burning Season, published by Blood Axe.

Burning Season is a book about fire and survival, climate change and nature’s defiance. Yvonne Reddick’s understanding of climate change is uniquely personal: her father was a petroleum engineer, and many members of her family worked in the fossil fuel industry. The collection speaks of the paradox that her Dad’s gift to her was her love of nature and mountain landscapes.

Burning Season includes a series of vivid, moving and heartfelt poems that explore her grief following her father’s death in a hiking accident. These are set against a wider backdrop of ecological loss and heartbreak.

Yvonne's website is: http://yvonnereddick.org/