Nick Drake

Award winning poet, playwright and novelist

man in thermal jacket on a sailing boat
Nick Drake performing The Farewell Glacier in 2010.

Nick Drake joined Cape Farewell’s 2010 Arctic Expedition sailing around Svalbard, an archipelago 500 miles north of Norway. The Farewell Glacier, his poem and a collection of poetry published under the same name, grew out of this journey. Poetry by Nick Drake also featured in High Arctic, an installation by UVA shown at the National Maritime Museum in 2011/12.

Biography

Nick Drake, born near London in 1961, has published several volumes of poetry including The Man in the White Suit, winner of Forward Prize for best first collection) and From The Word Go. He wrote the screenplay for Romulus my Father starring Eric Bana, which won Best Film at the Australian Film awards. His plays include To Reach The Clouds (an adaptation of Philippe Petit’s account of his high wire walk between the Twin Towers) and Success (National Theatre Connections). He is finishing the third in a trilogy of historical novels set in 18th dynasty Egypt, and also adapting them for TV. He is adapting the play Baghdad Wedding into a film, working on an opera based on the Philippe Petit play with composer Tansy Davies, and writing a play about young climate change activists for the National.

The Farewell Glacier – watch Nick Drake perform the poem
The Farewell Glacier – a collection of poems by Nick Drake
Follow Nick’s blog from the 2010 expedition
About the High Arctic installation

Skip links

  1. Top
  2. Skip to content top
  3. Skip to main menu
  4. Skip to search