ANTONY DUNN was born in London in 1973. He won the Newdigate Prize in 1995 and received a Society of Authors' Eric Gregory Award in 2000. He has published two collections of poems, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets 1998) and Flying Fish, (Carcanet OxfordPoets 2002) and a third, Bugs, is forthcoming.
His writing for theatre and film has included Goose Chase and Shepherds' Delight (both for Riding Lights Theatre Company), Timewarp 2000 (Barbican, York) and a screen adaption of Albert Camus' stageplay, Cross Purpose (First Man Productions). In 2006 he contributed lyrics to Mark Ravenhill's pantomime, Dick Whittington and His Cat (Barbican, London).
Antony is Head of Communications at Yorkshire Dance, and an Artistic Associate of Useful Donkey Theatre Company. He was Poet in Residence at the University of York for 2006.
“An often unique voice… subtle, thought-provoking and enormously readable”
Poetry Review
Antony's third collection of poems, Bugs will be published by Carcanet OxfordPoets on 30 September 2009.
Bugs will be launched with a short tour of the UK
Mon 5 Oct - London
Fri 9 Oct - York
Fri 16 Oct - Leeds
[Oxford date to be confirmed]
If you would like to arrange a reading in the UK or elsewhere, please e-mail contact@antonydunn.org
Bugs are the insects we live alongside, necessary and unsettling; they’re the fears, the ailments and spies that keep us wide awake at night. The stories in Antony Dunn’s third collection range from the microscopic lives of parasitic worms to the lives of the planets themselves. We go from the miniature world of the flea circus to the invisible pervasiveness of electronic surveillance. In an uneasy world, Dunn’s characters face down their terrors and find in science, in faith, in love, courage to go on.
Now heartening, now heartbroken, Bugs turns a magnifying glass on the world to reveal its fascinating strangeness.
Antony and his friend Simon Frost are Boomerang. Their first album, Seventeen Years, is on sale now.
Buy it here for a paltry £5
It betrays their undimmed fascination with pop music of a certain vintage - hints of a-ha, Duran, Thomas Dolby, Nik Kershaw, Madonna. You get the idea. And it was Album of the Month in Banks' music shop, York, when it was first released. Which is almost the same as five stars from Alex Petridis in our book.
Useful Donkey Theatre Company, which presented Mark Payton’s inspired and meticulous play, Rupert Brooke, to mark the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, is releasing a CD of Brooke's poems.
Read by actors and poets including Andrew Motion, Ian McMillan, James Wilby, Ian Duhig, Michael Symmons Roberts and Matthew Hollis, the CD is on sale now at Useful Donkey's website
£1 from every copy sold will be donated to the Armed Forces Memorial Appeal. http://www.forcesmemorial.org.uk/
Antony, with Julia Copus, Matthew Hollis and Clare Pollard, toured as Converging Lines to Athens in March 2008 for the British Council.
See videos of their reading with a group of Greek poets in the city's Dasein Coffee House here:
Dasein
Antony, with Valerie Bloom, Colette Bryce, Michael Donaghy and Ruth Padel, was commissioned to write a poem for the Victoria & Albert Museum. See the poems, and the video of Antony reading 'Antimony' here:
V&A
