Poet, playwright and broadcaster Lemn Sissay MBE will read from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats at a special event at the British Library on Sunday 24th November, 2-3pm.
Lemn Sissay is the Chancellor of the University of Manchester and was the first poet commissioned to write for the London Olympics. READ
To coincide with the 850th anniversary of the Murder of Thomas Becket, Scena Mundi Theatre Company are staging a new production of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in Southwark Cathedral – the last place that Thomas Becket preached before his assassination. READ
The fourth in a series of five annual lectures inspired by T. S. Eliot’s impact on modern literature, will be given by Sean Scully RA at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on Sunday 17th November.
The lecture, Belief versus Disbelief, will be followed by an interview led by Adrian Dunbar. READ
Four Quartets, a performance of dance and music hailed in the US as “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century”, is coming to the Barbican in May 2019. The performance, based on T. S. Eliot’s sequence of poems, has choreography by Pam Tanowitz, music by Kaija Saariaho, images by Brice Marden and a reading of Four Quartets by actor Kathleen Chalfont. READ
Sir Christopher Ricks is to give this year’s Annual T. S. Eliot Lecture in Cambridge on Monday 3rd December at 7pm. The title of the lecture is ‘The Imperfections of Humanity: T. S. Eliot and a Shakespearean Hero’.
W. READ
The 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist, which includes five debut collections, one small press, five men, five women, and two Americans, has been announced. Judges Sinéad Morrissey (Chair), Daljit Nagra and Clare Pollard have chosen the shortlist from a record 176 poetry collections submitted by ‘a plethora of poetry publishers’:
Ailbhe Darcy – Insistence (Bloodaxe)Terrance Hayes – American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin)
Zaffar Kunial – Us (Faber & Faber)
Nick Laird – Feel Free (Faber & Faber)
Fiona Moore – The Distal Point (HappenStance)
Sean O’Brien – Europa (Picador)
Phoebe Power – Shrines of Upper Austria (Carcanet)
Richard Scott – Soho (Faber & Faber)
Tracy K Smith – Wade in the Water (Penguin)
Hannah Sullivan – Three Poems (Faber & Faber)
The third of five annual lectures inspired by T. S. Eliot’s impact on modern literature will be given by Stephen Pinker, one of the world’s leading authorities on language and the mind and Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. The lecture, entitled Pessimism in a World of Progress, will be followed by an interview with Will Self. READ
Four Quartets – a performance of dance and music, alongside a reading of the poems – premiered last week at Bard College’s Summerscape festival in New York. This was the first authorised performance base
d on T. S. Eliot’s sequence of poems with choreography by Pam Tanowitz, music by Kaija Saariaho, images by Brice Marden and a reading of Four Quartets by Kathleen Chalfont. READ
First performed in 2015 as part of the Beckett Festival, now revived as part of the Mountains to Sea literary festival in 2018 by kind permission of the T. S. Eliot Estate, this performance remains true to the rhythms and references of 1922. READ
The T. S. Eliot Prize has announced the stunning 2017 shortlist and is marking the 25th anniversary of the Prize by increasing the prize money to £25,000. Newly commissioned videos and reviews of the poets’ work will be available on the website and through the Prize’s weekly newsletter. READ
