Ella Frears

Ella Frears is a poet and artist originally from Cornwall, now based in London. She’s the author of Shine, Darling, shortlisted for the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Goodlord, a hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, also shortlisted for the Forward Prize. She was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at The Courtauld, and a Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Frears’ poems have been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Greek, Turkish, Slovak, and Cornish. She hosts Tears for Frears, a chat and music show on Soho Radio.

At the Institute, Frears will work on SPENT, a new collection of unilateral poems that complicate ideas of character, class, and time. These poems will take the form of one-sided conversations with voices that are worn out, weary, exhausted, used up, or expired. Frears seeks to interrogate and expand the persona poem, testing its limits through performance, text, and audio recordings, and to question the role of the poet in a world that seems to be hurtling on fire into the extremities of the century.