Nocturnes at Nohant
the decade of Chopin and Sand
Today, I shall have a few guests, Madame Sand amongst them.' It's December 1836, Paris. Chopin is living on the fashionable rue de la Chaussee d'Antin and the novelist George Sand on the rue Lafitte. But falling in love with Sand also meant falling in love with her ancestral home, Nohant, a manor house set deep in the Berry countryside. In "Nocturnes at Nohant", we hear not only from Chopin and Sand, but also a rich cast of supporting characters who debate, in their sometimes humorous and often surprising way, the relationship between words and music, place and creativity, and the nature of the creative process itself. The powerful love story which threads the sequence together involves spending time not only in rural France, but also Warsaw, Paris, Majorca and Venice. Helen Farish's debut collection, "Intimates", a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. "Nocturnes at Nohant" shows a considerable advance on that achievement, notably with her mastery of voice and narrative.
Helen Farish was born in Cumbria in 1962, where she now lives. She has been a Fellow at Hawthornden International Centre for Writers and was the first female Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust (2004-05). She has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Sewanee University, Tennessee, a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Hampshire, and a lecturer in the department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her debut collection Intimates (Cape, 2005), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her audio CD Helen Farish reading from her poems was released by the Poetry Archive in 2009. Her second poetry book, Nocturnes at Nohant, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2012. Her third collection, The Dog of Memory, was published by Bloodaxe in 2016.
