Jack Underwood

Join us on the 5th October for a new – and the first post-pandemic – installation of Poetry on the Paragon.

We will be joined by Jack Underwood to celebrate his new collection A Year in the New Life. Jack is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College whose debut collection, Happiness, won him the Somerset Maugham Award.

Jack will be in-conversation with the acclaimed Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and The Death of Francis Bacon.  

A Year in the New Life is concerned with everything from imminent societal collapse and public unrest; the limits, myths and complexities of masculinity and fatherhood; to uncanny, often amusing scenarios, such as serving drinks to a gathering of fifteen babies or group kissing in Empathy Class.

Throughout, incongruous and domestic subjects realign in skewed lyrics and thought experiments, intimately expressed in ‘a new language / of the familiar’ (‘The Landing’). All is presented with a generosity and tenderness that makes Jack’s writing so unmistakable – and indispensable for the strange times in which we live.