A LEADING British poet will be reading at an event in Ulverston this month – and judging a brand-new competition.

A Poem and a Pint returns to the Laurel and Hardy Museum on Saturday September 29, with an event that also includes its first-ever poetry competition.

Clare Shaw is the guest for the night. Her third collection Flood, which was published by Bloodaxe in June, will be the focus of her reading. Its starting point is the 2015 floods which devastated many Cumbrian towns and also swept through Hebden Bridge, where Clare lives with her daughter and their two pet rats.

The book offers an eye-witness account of those events, from rainfall to rescue, contrasting as it does so the destructive effect of water on things, intimately interwoven with the breakdown of a relationship, with life in an asylum and with wider narratives including the Jimmy Savile case.

Clare is a regular tutor for the Writing Project, the Poetry School, the Wordsworth Trust and the Arvon Foundation and, for more than 15 years, has developed and delivered training courses on mental health awareness, self-injury and suicide and published widely in the field.

On every level of her writing, she works to find a language that can express feeling and experience in a way that it can be communicated with other people yet at the same time remain deep, personal and intense, and her expression is often innovative and brave.

Clare will be the main reader and she will introduce the prizewinners in the first Poem and a Pint Poetry Competition, who, together with some of the highly commended poets, will read from their work during the evening’s programme.

There will be music to suit the evening’s celebratory mood from South Cumbria’s inimitable a cappella group, Braddyll Friends, who can often be seen performing at W.I. parties, wedding parties, even informal events on Birkrigg Common. They will entertain the audience once more with another carefully chosen programme. Kim Moore will be the MC for the night, on what is an historic occasion for A Poem and a Pint.

The event on Saturday 29 starts at 7.30pm, and entrance is payable on the door.