Poet, priest, rock ‘n’ roller and scholar Revd Dr Malcolm Guite will be giving a talk at the next Island Spirituality Network meeting.

Guite will lead a session at St John’s Mill, in St John’s, on Saturday (November 11) from 10am to 1pm, on the theme ‘Poetry and Prayer - How poetry and the poetic imagination can open and enrich our prayer life’.

Guite served as chaplain to Girton College, Cambridge, for over two decades, where the fellows, staff and students enjoyed the fruit of his myriad writing, poetry, teaching and musical projects.

His colleagues described him as ‘a motorbike-riding, Grateful Dead-quoting, Bob Dylan-singing, priest, poet and mystic - one in a million’.

He was elected a life-time fellow of Girton before retiring to Norfolk in 2020 in order to consolidate and build on his world-leading reputation as a poet, and to develop his wider portfolio as a writer and sought-after speaker in the UK and in North America.

Guite is the author of eight collections of poetry and several on Christian faith and theology.

He has a decisively simple style in poems that tends to follow the traditional forms, particularly the sonnet.

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has said that Guite ‘knows exactly how to use the sonnet to powerful effect and his poems offer deep resources for meditation to the reader’.

Guite says his aim is to ‘be profound without ceasing to be beautiful’.

He has performed as a singer and guitarist fronting his Cambridgeshire-based rhythm and blues and rock band Mystery Train.

He enjoys smoking a pipe and riding through the English countryside on his Royal Enfield café racer.

The meeting has a suggested donation of £10.