ROME -- Will Kemp, winner of the 2016 Keats-Shelley Prize, an annual competition for essays and poems on Romantic themes launched by The Keats-Shelley memorial association, will be reading his latest collection of poems ‘The Painters Who Studied Clouds’ at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome September 30.

 The prize was inaugurated in 1998 and encourages writers to respond creatively to the work of the Romantics, as well as prize money. Will Kemp won it this year for his poem ‘Driving to work at 5am while listening to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor’, and now returns to give a special reading of his poems at the Keats-Shelley House at the foot of the Spanish Steps in the capital on Friday September 30 at 6.30pm.

 This will mark the publication of his third anthology, ‘The Painters Who Studied Clouds’, an evocatively-titled witty collection of poetry mostly about art and the natural world as well as music, literature, film and sport, full of surreal humorous elements, according to Cinnamon Press, the publisher of his works.

  Cinnamon Press published his first pamphlet, ‘The Missing Girl, as well as his full collections to date, ‘Nocturnes and Lowland’, and now his third, ‘The Painters Who Studied Clouds’.

 In addition to the Keats-Shelley Prize, Kemp has won the Debut Collection Award and the Envoi International. He has also had over 300 poems published in national journals and newspapers. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Will considers that his greatest achievement was finding his first collection on a bookshelf in Waterstones - next to Keats.

 The Keats-Shelley House is a museum dedicated to the English Romantic poets, who were spellbound by the Eternal City. is most famous for being the final dwelling place of John Keats, who died here in 1821, aged just 25.

 Entrance fee for the reading is 5 euros, advance booking mandatory

 More info: 066784235
 info@ksh.roma.it

 nkd