Launch: Drunken Driving by Martina Evans w/Ella Frears

Tuesday 9th June 6.30-9pm Join Martina Evans to launch her new collection Drunken Driving in conversation with Ella Frears (Goodlord, Shine, Darling). Drunken Driving is the funny and subversive sequel to Martina Evans’s narrative poem The Coming Thing, set ten years on. Imelda, now a young mother, is married to Carl. When she gets a job in the X-ray Department at Pentonville Prison and learns to drive, her previous preoccupations with life and death and abuse of power are intensified within the prison walls. The sonnets are ‘cuffed’ by quotes from Dracula and prison security rules, providing ironic commentary on the main narrative exploring issues of control. This timely collection delivers dark comedy as it raises serious questions about human society during the present international prison crisis, with the UK prison system on the verge of collapse. Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist. She grew up in County Cork and is the author of thirteen books of prose and poetry. American Mules (2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize and The Coming Thing (2023) was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize and PEN/Heaney Prize. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews poetry for the Irish Times. Her forthcoming collection Drunken Driving (2026) is a Poetry Book Society Summer Choice. Ella Frears is the author of Shine, Darling, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Goodlord, a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The Courtauld, and a Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Frears’ poems have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Slovak, and Cornish. This September she begins a fellowship at the Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris.