The Enfield Poets Society is welcoming two guests speakers this month, one of whom had a short story adapted into a Hollywood film.

The group, which first began seventeen years ago, meets the first Saturday of every month (except January, July and August), at the Dugdale Centre, in Enfield Town.

As official Poets in Residence at the Dugdale, they have hosted events in the theatre which have featured Poet Laureate Carol-Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion and Ruth Padel.

At the beginning of February, the guests of honour will be East End poet Derrick Porter and also David Constantine, whose story In Another Country has been adapted into the 2015 film, 45 Years.

Derrick Porter grew up in Hoxton and began to write poetry from the age of 13. However, he has no memory of ever having heard the word “poetry” spoken during the three years he attended school and from the time he first began to write, which was well into his thirties, he wrote without knowing there was even a poetry scene.

In his early forties, he moved to Orpington in Kent and joined a Writing for Pleasure group tutored by the poet Ted Walter – the first poet he ever met. Ted suggested he send his poems to Envoi and from then on, Derrick’s poems started to appear alongside mainstream poets.

In 2001, he joined the Poetry School, in Lambeth, where he became part of the wider poetry scene and during that time became a regular member of Enfield Poets.

Derrick’s poems began to appear in magazines such as Magma, Acumen, The Interpreter’s House, The New Writer, and in two anthologies. He also enjoyed success in a number of poetry competitions.

Not being educated in the traditions of poetry, nor familiar with the background histories of many of even the most popular of English poets, his inspiration came through the random reading of any book that by chance he stumbled upon, such as American poets and authors Elizabeth Bishop, John Steinbeck, Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver.

Derrick’s first full collection called The Voices of Hoxton was published in 2015 and he is now working on his main collection The Art of Timing.

David Constantine took a slightly different route into the world of writing. Born in Salford in 1944, he worked for 30 years as a university teacher of German language and literature. Over the years, he has published several volumes of poetry, with his most recent work being Nine Fathom Deep in 2009.

He is a translator of Hölderlin, Brecht, Goethe, Kleist, Michaux and Jaccottet and in 2003 his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter than Air won the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation.

David's four short story collections are Back at the Spike, as well as the highly acclaimed Under the Dam, The Shieling, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Tea at the Midland. Constantine’s story Tea at the Midland won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2010, and the collection as a whole won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in 2013.

He currently lives in Oxford and until 2011, he edited Modern Poetry In Translation with his wife Helen for ten years. David's short story In Another Country has been adapted into 45 Years, which has been turned into a film directed by Andrew Haigh and starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling.

This film won two silver bear awards at the Berlin Film Festival and has also been nominated for nine international others.

He is also the author of Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton Davies, and wrote a novel called The Life-Writer, which was published in 2015 alongside In Another Country: Selected Stories, to mark the release of 45 Years, the film, in the UK.

The Enfield Poets present: David Constantine and Derrick Porter, Room 4, The Dugdale Centre, Thomas Hardy House, London Road, Enfield Town, EN2 6DS, Saturday, February 4, 7.30pm to 10pm, details: 020 8807 6680, dugdalecentre.co.uk