Join Antony Dunn for the launch of his new poetry collection, Inbetween Days (Valley Press), in partnership with The Poetry School

Antony Dunn – Inbetween Days poetry launch

with special guests Laura Strickland and Spencer Wood

New Northern Poets (Word Up North) and The Poetry School

All proceeds support the Poetry School bursary scheme

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Antony Dunn’s Inbetween Days inhabits the charged territory between childhood and parenthood: a place of intense pleasure, pressure, responsibility and joy.

In poems that call and respond to his previous collection, Take This One to Bed, Dunn traces lines of inheritance and succession – from not-quite-grandfather to ‘hard-born, hard-won’ son, from poet to poet, from younger selves to older ones. These are poems of lives entangled with other lives, of sorrow accumulated and love stubbornly renewed, finding refuge in the most surprising places.

Poised between celebration and lament, between the dead and the living, Inbetween Days is an urgent, intimate and vividly alive collection, written – after a decade’s distraction – during a year-long residency in the poet’s own back-garden shed.

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‘A collection I didn't know I'd been thirsting for – absolutely gorgeous and a joy to read, keenly tuned to all our loves, guilts and griefs, punctuated by an aviary of strange winged prayers and written with a craft so deep and fluent that the whole collection is as musical and supple as wren-song.’

– FIONA BENSON

‘This is a wonderful collection, measured and lucid, economical and unclouded, full of poems that can make light work of heavy weather, often walking the microtonal terrain between childhood and parenthood – the borderlands of letting go – to cast a wry, level eye over proceedings, quietly revelatory and truthful.’

– PAUL FARLEY

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Antony Dunn has previously published four collections of poems; Pilots and Navigators (Oxford University Press), Flying Fish (Carcanet OxfordPoets), Bugs (Carcanet OxfordPoets) and Take This One to Bed (Valley Press). He edited and introduced Ex Libris, the posthumous collection of poems by David Hughes (Valley Press).

Antony has been the winner of the Northern Writers' Award for Poetry 2026, the Newdigate Prize and an Eric Gregory Award.

He is a regular tutor for The Poetry School, has taught many times for the Arvon Foundation and has worked on a number of translation projects with poets from Holland, Hungary, Israel/Palestine and China.

Antony has been Poet in Residence at Ilkley Literature Festival, the University of York and the People Powered Press. Until 2018 he was Artistic Director of the Bridlington Poetry Festival. He lives in Leeds.

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Inbetween Days is available to pre-order now from Valley Press:

https://valleypressuk.com/products/inbetween-days

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Laura Strickland was a New Northern Poet in 2025. Her publications include The North, Strix, The Frogmore Papers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Northern Gravy, Propel, Atrium and Butcher's Dog. She is a member of Dream Catcher's editorial board and was longlisted in the National Poetry Competition 2023 and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2025.

Spencer Wood (he/him) is a writer and facilitator and living in Leeds. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies such as And Other Poems, Fourteen Poems, Broken Sleep's Masculinity Anthology, a Verve Poetry Prize Anthology, Strix and Modern Queer Poets among others. Spencer’s creative non-fiction has been published in Hinterland and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His debut pamphlet fain will be published by Seedlings in July 2026. Spencer works for an arts charity leading shared reading groups in criminal justice settings across the north.

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