Tue 8 Sep, 5.30-7.30pm
Poet, writer and LJMU creative writing lecturer Helen Tookey discusses and reads from her new book Outward Bound from Liverpool: Reading Malcolm Lowry. Weaving together literary criticism, memoir and place-writing, the book takes the reader on an immersive journey through the landscapes – textual and geographical, remembered and reimagined – of Wirral-born novelist, poet and short-story writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–57).
At the same time, the book follows the author’s own evolving engagement with Lowry as she uses him to ‘think with’, turning his texts and her readings of them through unexpected angles, exploring questions of place and belonging, exile and home.
Moving through the various terrains of Lowry’s life and work – Liverpool and the Wirral; Dollarton in British Columbia, where he found his always-threatened idyll; the archive of his work; and the richly textured, symbolic landscapes of his writing itself – the book offers a compelling, lyrical and often moving account of a sustained engagement with a writer and what it can enable. Outward Bound from Liverpool also pays tribute to the humour, beauty and passion of Lowry’s writing, his deeply felt sense of place, and his prescient concern for the natural world. It explores how reading can change us and shows why Lowry is a writer still very much for today.
Helen will be in conversation with the Bluecoat’s Director of Cultural Legacies, Bryan Biggs, with whom she collaborates on the arts centre’s annual Lowry Lounge celebration of the writer.
"A generous and open-minded literary adventure. Thoroughly researched but never allowing the propulsive narrative to be held back. Helen Tookey wins our trust and delivers a brave sequence of approaches to an impossible and endlessly rewarding author" - Iain Sinclair
Outward Bound from Liverpool: Reading Malcolm Lowry is published by Liverpool University Press, August 2026
Free, booking required
Helen Tookey
Helen Tookey is Reader in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She has published three collections of poetry with Carcanet Press: Missel-Child (2014), City of Departures (2019) and In the Quaker Hotel (2022). She is also the co-editor, with Bryan Biggs, of two books published by Liverpool University Press, Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World (2009) and Remaking the Voyage: New Essays on Malcolm Lowry and In Ballast to the White Sea (2020).
