The earliest surviving letter from T. S. Eliot was written in Gloucester, Massachusetts in June 1898. In the letter, addressed to his “Papa”, 9-year old Eliot writes of the coolness of the house in the morning, a broken microscope, butterfly and spider specimens, and hunting for birds with his sister, Charlotte. READ
Brian Teare has won this year’s Four Quartets Prize for his poem “Toxics Release Inventory (Essay on Man)”, with Ilya Kaminsky (Deaf Republic) and Prageeta Sharma (Grief Sequence) announced as fellow finalists. The prize, presented by the T.
DIRECTIONS TO MY EXECUTORS
regarding the envelope enclosed herewith.
Miss Emily Hale, of Massachusetts, has presented to the Library of Princeton University the letters which I wrote to her between 1932 and 1947 – possibly a few of them a little earlier; any written after the death of my first wife are so different in sentiment that she may not have included them. READ
Hannah Sullivan is to give this year’s Annual T. S. Eliot Lecture in Oxford on Thursday 28th November at 5:30pm. The title of the lecture is T. S. Eliot and the Art of Abandonment.
Dr Hannah Sullivan is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow at New College, Oxford. READ
First performed in 2015 as part of the Beckett Festival, The Waste Land with Nick Roth Quintet, directed by Adrian Dunbar will be performed at October Gallery in London at 3pm and 7:30 pm on Saturday 23rd November and 3pm Sunday 24th November. READ
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
An embroidery made by a young T. S. Eliot hinted at things to come. The embroidery, made in 1894, shows a ribbon-collared cat ready to pounce on a ball of wool. It’s believed Eliot first put pen to paper with his cats in a 1931 letter to his young godson, Tom Faber, who had written to Eliot about his cat. READ
The Poetry Society of America has opened submissions for the Four Quartets Prize for 2019.
The Four Quartets Prize is for a unified and complete sequence of poems published in America in a print or online journal, chapbook, or book in 2019. 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
