News

In her fifth book Janet Sutherland explores journals written by her great-great-grandfather, George Davies, as he travelled to Serbia with his Queen’s Messenger friend, Mr Gutch, in 1846 and 1847. She writes her own journals during a trip to Hungary and Serbia in 2018 and after her cancer diagnosis and treatment during the first Covid lockdowns of 2020. Poems, journals, letters, messenger regulations and other testimony, both imaginary and actual, question, answer and echo each other in a radical collage. All the writers are grappling with uncertainties. Sutherland is intrigued by what these testimonies reveal and hide. Part history, part poetry, part travelogue – these journals, poems and other writings interweave the then and now, the observed and imagined. What do we know about these messages and their messengers? What secrets and possibilities might these words carry? What can they tell us about ourselves?

Available from Shearsman Books and:
The Book Depository
amazon.co.uk
Indiebound (USA)
Barnes and Noble.com
amazon.com

Published April 2023. Paperback, 264pp, 9x6ins. £16.95 / $24
ISBN 9781848618824

I was very pleased to have a poem in the new edition of The North, Issue 68 (August 2022) which became available in November 2022. This issue was edited by Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia. My poem is called Dissolving Views, Falling Snow, etc.

I was recently interviewed about, and read some poems from my last poetry collection Home Farm, Shearsman Books, for Sian Thomas on Wildhart radio. We talked about memory, writing and the farm where I grew up. Sian interviews poets on Wildhart Radio and there is a large back catalogue of readings to listen to, including mine. Wildhart Radio is a community radio station, coming from the heart of Forest Row in Sussex and broadcasts to Sussex, the UK & the World.

Sussex Wildlife Trust uploaded a video of the Seven Sisters with audio of me reading my poem Seaford Head on National Poetry Day 2022

I was interviewed recently on the Planet Poetry Podcast hosted by Peter Kenny and Robin Houghton and what a pleasure it was to talk poetry with Peter and read some of my poems. The episode is called "Eels | Elements - with Janet Sutherland" and can be heard by clicking on the link below or simply by searching for "Planet Poetry Podcast". There are over 24 hours of recordings in this series, each episode features one or two poets plus conversations about the works of others, so do listen if you can.

A reading by poets Rachael Clyne, Frances Presley and Janet Sutherland , via Zoom, 1st February 2021, introduced by Aidan Semmens, editor of Molly Bloom magazine.

Rob McLennan has asked questions of more than two hundred poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, from North America and beyond, to see the range of their answers to a series of similar questions. Here he asks me those questions...

Writer Peter Kenny reviews home Farm

Hawthornden Fellowships are awarded annually to writers who apply to spend a month writing at Hawthornden Castle in Scotland.

Readings in Hungary and Serbia in 2019

Robin Houghton's poetry blog is a mine of information for poets navigating their way to making submissions to poetry magazines and anthologies. I was very pleased to see she had reviewed Home Farm recently.

The first review of Home Farm appeared in early February in local magazine Viva Lewes.

The Wombwell Rainbow is a blog produced by Paul Brookes. Here he asks questions about my work