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This afternoon’s extended reading and discussion will feature three poets based in the UK for whom storytelling is key. Many of David Constantine’s poems tell stories, and many have stories untold or partially told in them, which begs the question as to what to include and what to miss out in a more compressed form such as poetry. Parwana Fayaz considers stories a key part of her life, through the power it granted her as a refugee in Pakistan and later as a wanderer in pursuit of education on different continents. In Forty Names Parwana evokes events in the lives of Afghan women, past and present, as part of an exercise in imagining and measuring a life against the odds. Martina Evans will read from her narrative poem ‘Mountainy Men’ (from her collection American Mules). This is a poem based on a true story, while drawing on folk tale archetypes that grew over many years; during its time it has been a novel, a prose poem, and a short story before it came into its own in its current form.