Event Details

Heather Clark, author of new biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, discusses Plath's life and work with Paul Muldoon and Sarah Corbett

Sarah Corbett chairs a conversation on the life and work of Sylvia Plath between Heather Clark and Paul Muldoon.

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship; a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York; and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library. A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Her latest publication is Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.

Sarah Corbett is a poet, writer, teacher, producer and editor. She has published five poetry collections, most recently A Perfect Mirror (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool University Press, 2018), including the verse-novel And She Was (Pavilion Poetry, 2015). Both collections were Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prizes. Her first collection The Red Wardrobe (Seren, 1998) won an Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and the T.S. Eliot prize. A new collection is forthcoming from Pavilion in 2023. Sarah also writes fiction and has won two Northern Writer's Awards and her work has been longlisted for the Mslexia and Caledonia first novel prizes. Sarah lives in Hebden Bridge, where she directed the first Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in 2022. She is co-editor of After Sylvia (2023)

Paul Muldoon is “The most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War” The Times Literary Supplement, and "One of the great poets of the past 100 years” New York Times Book Review. he is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry here at Lancaster University.

The conversation will be followed by a drinks reception