Sean O'Brien | Book Launch

Thursday 22nd January 2026 | 7:30

Award-winning Newcastle-based poet Sean O’Brien launches and reads from his new collection of poetry, The Bonfire Party.

The preoccupations of Sean O’Brien’s recent work have for many of us become newly pressing: the recurrence of history, the shadow of war, the precariousness of a peacetime that can no longer be taken for granted.

The Bonfire Party, O’Brien’s twelfth collection, takes its title from Eric Ravilious’s 1930s painting, where some revellers watch the flames, while others feed them or run towards them, in a scene of ‘mythic Englishness’. In these poems, the long view afforded by experience results in a truer representation of our predicament and a regretful understanding of human culpability. Just as times and places flow together to create a shifting, sometimes visionary perspective, so too do the presences of those we have lost, ‘love and death consorting as they must’.

The working of the imagination itself has become O’Brien’s true subject, where the fact of the world and the imagined order of literature and art begin to merge. “The greatest pleasure, whatever he chooses to write about, is O’Brien’s unforced gift, the ease of the writing, the phrases that seem to roll off his pen.”

- Kate Kellaway, Observer

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE

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Image 1 | The Bonfire Party, by Sean O'Brien | Book Cover | Image provided by promoter

Image 2 | Sean O' Brien, author | Image provided by promoter

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