CHS News | Michael Marks award-winning poets reading their own work


2016 Poets in Residence Program

Poets Gill Mc Evoy and Jennifer Elliott, this year’s winners of the “Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets” in London and Edinburgh (a.k.a. the Callum MacDonald Award), participated in the Michael Marks Poets in Residence Program for two weeks during the past summer. The CHS had prepared a program full of activities in Nafplio, Ancient Olympia, Delphi, and Athens.

Once in Ancient Olympia, our two brilliant poets read their own work to an enthusiastic audience. Their poems’ rhythm evokes meaningful imagery to all of our senses; a powerful, vivid verbal world unfolds. Enjoy!

A few words about the poets

Gill McEvoy

Gill Mc Evoy was born in London and has lived in the USA, Finland and Ireland. She is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. She runs various poetry events in Chester where she now lives. She received a Hawthornden Award in 2012 and has won many prizes for her poetry.

Jenny Elliott

Jenny Elliott was born in Edinburgh and her family are from the Shetland Islands. She studied chemistry to PhD level at the University of St. Andrews and worked for some years as an environmental chemist. She has also worked as a free-range egg farmer, a hand knitter and as a teacher of hearing and visually impaired teenagers. She currently teaches children in hospital, while tending a small farm and writing poetry. Over the years her poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies and have often featured in exhibitions as a result of collaborations with artists. She has also been involved in the running of StAnza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival, since 1999 and in 2007 she set up The Shed Press, a small press producing handmade poetry pamphlets and other poetry gifts. The pamphlets One Old Onion & Other Stories and Seeing the Wood for the Trees were shortlisted for Callum Macdonald Memorial Awards in 2014 and 2015 and her pamphlet Makkin-wires won the Callum Macdonald Memorial Award in 2016.

For more poetry and information on the poets’ work, visit the CHS dedicated webpages for Gill McEvoy and Jenny Elliott.