Poetry with Eleanor Brown

This unusual and beautiful volume gathers the lost voices of the past in a benign web. (Yorkshire Times)

In a podcast for the Festival of the Mind 2020, Sheffield poet Eleanor Brown reads from White Ink Stains, a collection of poems which centres the voices of mainly working class women of the Silent Generation, whose cultural contribution is written in ‘white ink’. Many of the poems were made in response to the Reading Sheffield oral history project.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Eleanor says:

“I spent over a year listening to the recorded testimony of people talking about how formative, nourishing, sustaining, how necessary literature had been in their lives. For the most part they had not had it handed to them on a plate. They were not from culturally or educationally privileged circumstances. The more I attended to them, the more I wondered why the 20th Century British cultural establishment and its gatekeepers were historically so hostile to ordinary readers and consumers of literature and art. This question was a jumping-off point for the entire Reading Sheffield project.

White Ink Stains is published by Bloodaxe Books and is available from all good booksellers.