Book Launch: Apropos Paradise Square - On a Literature of Consolation

Join us at the Liszt Institute London for the launch of Apropos Paradise Square (Pamenar Press, 2025), the latest book by poet and theorist Ágnes Lehóczky, in conversation with writer Katharine Kilalea.

This special evening will explore poetry, place, memory and consolation, as Lehóczky discusses her new work and wider creative practice with one of the UK’s most distinctive contemporary voices.

Published by Pamenar Press, Apropos Paradise Square: On a Literature of Consolation is a hybrid poetic work that moves between essay, lyric and psychogeography. The book explores imagined and remembered spaces - houses, squares, rooms and temporary shelters - asking how poetry can offer consolation, not as escape, but as a way of thinking, dwelling and surviving.

Restless, intimate and formally inventive, Apropos Paradise Square continues Lehóczky’s ongoing exploration of the “poet’s house” and the spaces we inhabit, lose and rebuild through language.

About Ágnes Lehóczky

Ágnes Lehóczky’s poetry collections published in the UK are Budapest to Babel (Egg Box, 2008), Rememberer (Egg Box, 2012), Carillonneur (Shearsman, 2014), Swimming Pool (Shearsman, 2017), Lathe Biosas, or on Dreams & Lies (Crater Press, 2023) and Apropos Paradise Square (Pamenar Press, 2025). She also has three full poetry collections in Hungarian published in Budapest: Ikszedik stáció (Universitas, 2000), Medalion (Universitas, 2002) and Palimpszeszt (Magyar Napló, 2015). She is the author of the academic monograph Poetry, the Geometry of Living Substance – comprising four essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy (2011). Her pamphlet Pool Epitaphs and Other Love Letters was published by Boiler House Press (2017). She co-edited major international anthologies: the Sheffield Anthology (Smith/Doorstop, 2012) with Adam Piette, The World Speaking Back to Denise Riley (Boiler House, 2018) with Zoë Skoulding, Wretched Strangers (Boiler House, 2018) with J. T. Welsch and most recently the ‘Monk Collective’ with Adam Piette (Blackbox Manifold, 2023). Fission of Being – Endnotes on Earthbound was commissioned by The Roberts Institute of Art, London in 2021. She is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Director of the Centre for Poetry and Poetics at the University of Sheffield. Lehóczky edited The Song of the Cosmos – Attila József Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2026) which she co-translated with Adam Piette.

About Katharine Kilalea

Katharine Kilalea grew up in South Africa and now lives in London. Her poetry collection, One Eye’d Leigh, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under 30. Her novel, OK, Mr Field, which was serialised in The Paris Review and named a book of the year by Publishers Weekly and LitHub, was shortlisted for the Collyer-Bristow prize. Her second novel, Ranter’s Triumph, will be published by Faber & Faber in 2027.

We warmly invite readers, writers and lovers of contemporary poetry to join us for an evening of conversation, readings and reflection.