text: Places of Poetry’s penultimate stop is the Kia Oval, for the 5th Test Match of the 2019 Ashes series between (if this has somehow passed you by) Australia and England. Zaffar Kunial is our poet-in-residence and a life-long cricket fan. Growing up in Edgbaston, some of his earlier memories are of the cricket matches he used to go to with his father. Zaffar will be launching his pamphlet of cricket-based poems, Six, and then producing some more as the official test match poet. Places of Poetry will be celebrating sports-themed poetry across the course of the test match – all you have to do is pin a sports based poem onto our map.
  A brief bio of Zaffar. He was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust’s Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has appeared at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC Radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem ‘The Word’. His collection Us was published by Faber & Faber in 2018.