Transreading Creative Risk with Penned in the Margins
Take inspiration from one of the UK's most innovative and exciting poetry publishers.
Explore what creative risk means to you, and how to manage and deploy it, with poetry publisher and performing arts company Penned in the Margins.
From 2006 to 2022, Penned in the Margins published almost 100 books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and produced over 20 theatrical and performance projects, transforming the careers of many writers and performing artists, and introducing readers and audiences all over the world to new styles and forms of literature.
In this course we will study four collections of poetry and one performance project from the Penned in the Margins back catalogue, unpicking the multiple ways in which they manage risk – from Gail McConnell’s moving experiments in memory and Luke Kennard’s unsettling of the canon, to the probing poems of silence and sound in Raymond Antrobus’s multi-award-winning book The Perseverance.
We will explore the creative process from conception to publication or performance, and learn how to build risk and experimentation into your artistic practice. You will have the opportunity to write your own poems or texts in response to the works considered, and to receive constructive feedback from Penned in the Margins founder and editor Tom Chivers.
The course is designed both for those who are already working on collections or interdisciplinary projects of any kind and would like some guidance on how to develop their work further, and for those who are new to poetry and interested in taking risks with their writing.
5 fortnightly sessions over 10 weeks. No live chats. Suitable for UK & International students.
To apply for a concessionary rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected]. For more information visit our Online Courses page.
Image credit: @raimondklavins
About Tom Chivers 
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Tom Chivers is a writer, publisher, and arts producer from south London. He has published two pamphlets and two books of poetry, including Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Prize in 2014. He has made audio, site-specific and perambulatory work for LIFT, Cape Farewell, and the Southbank Centre. His non-fiction debut London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City (Doubleday/Penguin, 2021) was Audiobook of the Week in The Times.
As director of Penned in the Margins from its inception in 2004, Tom edited and published almost 100 books, including numerous award-winning titles of poetry, and produced over 20 theatrical and performance projects, working with over 500 writers and artists.
He is currently completing an AHRC-funded PhD at Queen Mary, University of London with Museum of London Archaeology entitled In the Flow of Things: Encounters with the Mudlarks of the Thames Foreshore. He lives in Rotherhithe with his daughters.
"The UK Poetry School offers an amazing, wonderful, high caliber, professional, warm and welcoming environment of tutors and peers in which my poetry and my appreciation of poetry have flourished."
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