Reframing Ekphrasis with Padraig Regan

Ekphrasis is the vivid description of artworks through words. In this poetry workshop with writer Padraig Regan, you’ll learn how to use traditional ekphrasis techniques to explore natural objects (eg. stones, fossils, plants) as artworks in their own right. 

You’ll be invited to consider how language might approach the non-human, rethinking our relationship to natural objects and celebrating the pleasures of looking. 

Participants are encouraged to bring to class a small, portable natural object (or photograph of an object) as a starting point for writing.

Padraig Regan's debut collection Some Integrity was published by Carcanet in 2022 and was awarded the Clarissa Luard Award and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

They are the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. 

They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They were Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge from 2022-2024.