Phil Bowen
Poet, performer, playwright, educator, lecturer, biographer and editor, Phil Bowen leaves no stone unturned in his unfaltering advocacy of poetry. Using sparkling wit, wiley-fox wisdom and resounding wordplay, Phil has been converting poetry naysayers, young and old, for the best part of a decade. This year he’s set his literary sights on the higgledy piggeldy crowds of Port Eliot.
Heralding from Liverpool, 1949, Phil’s first collection of poems, The Professor’s Boots, was published in 1994 and his most recent collection, Nowhere’s Far, was published this year. In 1998 he was selected for the highly respected annual publication Forward Book of Poetry and was the Bridport Prize runner-up in the same year. As a performer he has creaked the floorboards and hushed audiences at The Poetry Café, The Voice Box and The Troubador alongside fellow Liverpudlian luminaries Brian Patten and Roger McGough and cult favourites Ian McMillan and John Cooper Clarke.
When not scribbling stanzas, Phil can be found dipping his toes in all other literary waters. As an editor he has overseen anthologies of poetry celebrating two colossuses of music, Bob Dylan and The Beatles. And as a biographer he’s traced the history of the city of his birth through his fellow poet’s musings and meanderings in A Gallery to Play To – The Story of the Mersey Poets, re-published last year. A Handful of Rain, one of his seven plays, depicting an imagined meeting between Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, was called “a resonant and poetic piece” (Dave Simmons, The Stage).
Ever in pursuit of widening the populist poetry-sphere, Phil has run workshops, worked with teachers and lectured in over 400 schools and colleges from Eton to Jersey. He’s devised multimedia pieces for the children of Cornwall and beyond and contributed ‘Adrian’s Wall’ – a 20-foot installation commemorating late Mersey poet Adrian Henri – to Liverpool’s stint as the Capital of Culture in 2008. Called “the best literary resource in Cornwall” (Dave Leek, Head teacher Trythall School), Phil is not to missed at this year’s festival.
Those who knock poetry, prepared to be knocked back.
“Phil Bowen was beamed down specially from another planet, and by the time he’d got to his first poem the audience were reeling with laughter, when he delivered his final piece there was hardly a dry eye in the house.”
Peter Osbourne, Swansea Platform
“A spellbinding and very funny reading – he creates his own world and takes us all on his journey.”
Jo Roach, The Poetry Café
“A magnificent way with words.”
Ken Dodd
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