We're delighted that Michael Pedersen is returning to the bookshop for an event to launch his brand new collection of poems, The Cat Prince & Other Poems. We've hosted brilliant events with Michael over the last few years and his book, Boy Friends, was our first Porty by Post non-fiction subscription box book so it's great to be able to welcome him back for another launch.

This event will take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home.

Livestream vouchers are valid until the day after the event and can be redeemed on the website against a single copy of The Cat Prince & Other Poems.

The Cat Prince & Other Poems is the third collection from prize-winning poet, and author of Boy Friends, Michael Pedersen. All moggy moxie, Pedersen croons to the beauty and devastation of love, loss, friendship, cats and careless joy. Equal parts tender and trenchant, raw and ribald, plangent and smutty, these poems exhibit an emotionally charged, fantastical playground of language and lore.

From the brutalising death of a cherished friend comes a gut-wrenching grief. And so begins a tenacious quest for light, lustre and survival as Pedersen pays tender tribute to a gorgeous, life- altering friendship. In doing so, he harks back to the hilarity of being young, reckless and petrified: memories of boys showboating in a fishing tackle shop, games of feline metamorphosis, laments for demolished buildings and a case of constipation of the most pernicious stock.

As frisky as it is fierce, The Cat Prince pounces around the poet’s emotional and physical landscapes, past and present, unfankling a Scotland full of gothic splendour and nature’s majesty. These poems reveal a poet at his bravest and most vulnerable. The Cat Prince & Other Poems purrs with affection, flashes its teeth, then digs in the claws.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning Scottish poet, scribbler, stitcher. He’s produced two acclaimed collections of poetry (Polygon Books) with a poetic prose debut, Boy Friends, published by Faber & Faber in July 2022. He won a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship, the John Mather’s Trust Rising Star of Literature Award, and was a finalist for the 2018 ‘Writer of the Year’ at The Herald Scottish Culture Awards. Pedersen also co-founded the literary collective Neu! Reekie!, and has 15 Christmas Jumpers: responsibly sourced and worn shamelessly from mid-October. His new collection, The Cat Prince & Other Poems, will be published in July 2023.

Michael Pedersen – The Cat Prince & Other Poems