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The Sunday Sessions consists of twenty-six poems, the contents of two tapes recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 – reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes, which contain work from Larkin’s first major collection, The North Ship, as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, remained ‘lost’ for over two decades, lying on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded. Since their rediscovery they have been the subject of widespread media attention, including a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour documentary. Their contents are here published in full for the first time.
Philip Larkin, poet, novelist and librarian, was born in Coventry in 1922. He published four volumes of poetry – The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) – for which he received innumerable honours including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and the WH Smith Award. He also wrote two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and his journalism is collected in two volumes, All…
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