Nature Matters: An Evening of Poetry with Karen McCarthy Woolf, Nina Mingya Powles, and Zaffar Kunial

Book tickets

Event details

Writers at York event

Legendary publishing house Faber and Faber presents Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority, a revelatory contribution to the recent surge in nature writing. Brand-new commissions alongside half a century of formative works explore themes including climate crisis and the Anthropocene; urban nature, solitude and alienation; protest and radical empathy; Indigenous wisdom and alternative histories. Edited by poets Karen McCarthy Woolf and Mona Arshi, Nature Matters is a genre-enriching anthology, revitalising conversations around environmentalism and ecopoetics.

About the speakers

Karen McCarthy Woolf FRSL, PhD, is the author of three poetry collections and editor of seven literary anthologies. Her novel in verse, Top Doll, was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and her début, An Aviary of Small Birds was an Observer Book of the Year. In 2025 she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley Award and the Jerwood Prize for Poetry (England). As a postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar at UCLA, she was poet in residence at the Promise Institute for Human Rights, where she wrote her latest collection, Unsafe (Bloomsbury, 2026). Born in London to English and Jamaican parents, Karen McCarthy Woolf is an internationally experienced performer, whose work has been widely translated.

Nina Mingya Powles is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and poet based in the UK. She is the author of several poetry collections and pamphlets, most recently In the Hollow of the Wave (2025) and Magnolia 木蘭 (2020).  Her debut work of creative nonfiction, Small Bodies of Water (2021), was the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing. Along with Pratyusha, Alycia Pirmohamed and Jessica J. Lee, she co-authored the experimental eco-poetics project this too is a glistening. 

Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham, who lives in Yorkshire. His mother was English and his father, who has since moved to Lahore, is from Kashmir. His collections US (Faber, 2018) was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. England’s Green (Faber, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Choice, and shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Winner of the Windham-Campbell Prize (2022), the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize (2014), and the Northern Writers’ Award (2013), Zaffar Kunial has been Poet-in-Residence for the Brontë Parsonage and at the Wordsworth Trust.