The Banquet - Poetry Reading

The Banquet, a poetry reading by Stav Poleg on Thursday 13th November at 5 pm

Poet Stav Poleg will read poems from her new collection, The Banquet, followed by a Q&A. 

The Banquet explores the fragile, intricate links between language and longing — how words can reconstruct great cities out of memories and dreams, tear them apart, or carry them from one place to another, as if each city, house and chamber were made of sonic and visual images rather than walls and bricks. Moving between the worlds of philosophy, theatre and poetry — from Dante’s Florence to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge; from Tom Stoppard’s theatre stage to the harsh landscapes of Rimbaud’s poetry — The Banquet explores the ever-growing tensions between words and action, knowledge and ethics.

Admission is free but booking is required due to the limited number of spaces (please write to info@keats-shelley-house.org).

Entry from 4:45 pm onwards. 

Stav Poleg is a writer, poetry editor, and creative writing tutor based in Cambridge, UK. Her debut poetry collection, The City (Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for the Financial Times’ Best Summer Books 2022, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection, 2023. Her second poetry collection, The Banquet (Carcanet, 2025) is currently shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025. Poleg’s poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in The New Yorker, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review and elsewhere. Her work has been published in leading anthologies, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker (Knopf, 2025), The Forward Book of Poetry (Faber, 2024 ) and New Poetries VIII (Carcanet, 2021). Her graphic-novel installation, ‘Dear Penelope: Variations on an August Morning’, created with artist Laura Gressani, was acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Her theatre work was read at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, and the Shunt Vaults, London, and most recently at Kettle’s Yard gallery, Cambridge. She serves on the editorial board of Magma Poetry magazine and teaches for the Poetry School on a range of subjects including poetry inspired by the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey and the cinema of Fellini.