The Banquet

Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025

The Banquet explores the fragile, intricate links between language and longing — how words can reconstruct great cities out of memories and dreams, tear them apart, or carry them from one place to another, as if each city, house and chamber were made of sonic and visual images rather than walls and bricks. Moving between the worlds of philosophy, theatre and poetry — from Dante’s Florence to Wittgenstein’s Cambridge; from Tom Stoppard’s theatre stage to the harsh landscapes of Rimbaud’s poetry — The Banquet explores the ever-growing tensions between words and action, knowledge and ethics.

Stav Poleg’ s debut poetry collection, The City (Carcanet, 2022) was chosen for the Financial Times’ Best Summer Books 2022, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for First Collection, 2023. Her poetry has appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, PN Review and elsewhere. A selection of her work is featured in New Poetries VIII (Carcanet, 2021). She lives in Cambridge, UK.

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