Poets Charlie Lee-Potter & Penny Boxall in conversation

MAIN IMAGE: Charlie Lee-Potter, Bark Fragment, 100 cm x 75 cm.

For the past year, Charlie Lee-Potter has been writer in residence at the University of Oxford's Wytham Woods. Join her for an in-conversation event with poet Penny Boxall as they discuss the inspiration Wytham brings to writers and artists alike.

Charlie will read from her new poetry collection, A Line is a Breathless Length, created during her residency. The collection emerged from Charlie's walks in the woods, observing the patterns, timelines and occasional brutalities of nature. She's conjured an imaginary community of eccentrics, misfits, grammar obsessives, geometry lovers and loners. There’s the man who views the world through cylinders and cubes, the walker injured by a falling squirrel, the elderly actor who sings lines from a rice pudding recipe and the friendless romantic who reads her own knee. The cast of hapless characters sometimes mingle with the more-than-human, while algebraic topology, knitting patterns and a polysyndeton all play their part. Illustrated with Charlie’s drawings and etchings, the poems’ humour and wordplay bring warmth and humanity to these poignant, often moving micro-stories.

Copies of A Line is a Breathless Length will be available to buy on the day, along with works by Penny. It may be possible to offer a guided walk of the woods after the in-conversation event.

Charlie Lee-Potter is an award-winning writer, poet and artist. She’s a former BBC foreign correspondent and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s PM, The World at One and Open Book. Charlie is the recipient of the International Créateurs Prize for Creative Journalism and her podcast about the creative imagination, Inside A Mountain, was shortlisted for the International Women’s Podcast Awards. She holds two doctorates and is a lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford.

Penny Boxall won the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award with her debut collection, Ship of the Line. She was 2023-4 writer in residence at Wytham Woods, and (in 2019) Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College. Her debut novel for children, Letty and the Mystery of the Golden Thread, was published in 2025 by Puffin, and was Blackwell’s Children's Book of the Month.

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