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tcls trinity college literary society |
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trinity college cambridge cb2 1tq |
past events
Reading by CAROL RUMENS Tues. 11th November, 6pm Junior Parlour
Free for Trinity students (£1 other).
Reading by JAMIE McKENDRICK and MICHAEL O'NEILL Tues. 28th October, 8pm Old Combination Room
In the 1990s, Jamie McKendrick was named as one of the Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation’ poets. He lives in Oxford, where he teaches part-time and reviews poetry and the visual arts for a number of newspapers and magazines. He has held residencies at Hertford College, Oxford, Masaryk University, Brno, and the University of Gothenburg, and is at present writer-in-residence at University College, London. He is editor of the recent Faber Book of 20th-century Italian Poems (2004), and is currently working on a translation of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli.
Free for Trinity students (£1 other).
Reading by ALICE OSWALD Fri. 10th October, 6pm Master's Lodge
Her second collection is Dart (2002), a long work which combines verse and prose, and tells the story of the River Dart in Devon. To write this poem, she spent three years collecting information about the river and talking to people who use the river in their daily lives. The result is a highly original dream-like poem told from a variety of perspectives. Jeanette Winterson called it a '… moving, changing poem, as fast-flowing as the river and as deep … a celebration of difference.' (The Times, 27 July 2002). Dart won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. In 2004, Alice Oswald was named as one of the Poetry Book Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her latest collection, Woods etc., was published in 2005, and was shortlisted for the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2007, her poem 'Dunt' won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem). Free for Trinity students (£2 other).
Reading by A. S. BYATT Wed 21st May, 8pm Old Combination Room [POSTPONED]
A. S. Byatt is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, Elementals and her most recent book Little Black Book of Stories. A distinguished critic as well as a writer of fiction, A S Byatt was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.
She will read from new work.
Free
Reading by poets from the TALL-LIGHTHOUSE Mon. 12th May, 8pm Old Combination Room
Tall-Lighthouse is an independent poetry business publishing full collections, pamphlets, chapbooks and anthologies of poetry – they are also unique as a poetry business in organising poetry readings & events in across the UK as well as facilitating writing workshops in conjunction with Arts, Education, Library & Community Services. At Trinity College we will bring along three different poetic voices - Andy Brown, Helen Mort, and John McCullough - and there will be the chance to talk to Les Robinson Director & founder of tall-lighthouse press.
For more information about the participating poets see here. See also the tall-lighthouse website.
Free
Reading by JACOB POLLEY Wed. 5th March, 9pm Old Combination Room
Free for Trinity Students (£2 other)
Reading by JEFFREY ARCHER Friday 29th Feb., 8pm Old Combination Room
Written to repay his creditors, his first novel, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976), became an international bestseller, and was televised in 1990 by the BBC. Archer has since published another thirteen novels, of which Kane and Abel (1979) is the best known, selling 3.5 million copies in the UK paperback edition alone. He has also published five collections of short stories and three books for children. His first play Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1987) which ran in London's West End for over 600 performances, was followed up by Exclusive (1989), and then The Accused (2000), a courtroom drama with a twist, in which the audience acts as the jury, and decide which of two different endings the play should have. Jeffrey took on his first West End role, playing the part of the accused.
Having served two years in prison for perjury and perverting the course of justice, Archer was released in 2003, and has published three volumes of his Prison Diary. His most recent novel, False Impressions, was published in 2006, and his next, A Prisoner of Birth, is due out later this year.
Free
Reading by ANNE STEVENSON Monday 18th Feb., 9pm Winstanley Lecture Theatre
Her latest collection last year, Stone Milk, came out last year, while a collected edition of her work, Poems 1955-2005, was published in 2005.
Free for Trinity students (£2 other)
Reading by EMILY DENING and KEARAN WILLIAMS Monday 4th Feb., 8pm Junior Parlour
Local poets Emily Dening (pictured) and Kearan Williams live and work in Cambridge. Emily's works have appeared in a number of poetry journals, and in 2005 she was runner-up in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. Emily's first collection was published in January of this year. Kearan's poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, The Rialto, and Critical Quarterly.
Free
Reading by poets from PERDIKA PRESS Monday 28th Jan., 8pm Old Combination Room
Perdika's last visit to Trinity proved to be one of the most popular events we've ever hosted. This second visit will include readings by six Perdika poets: Mario Petrucci (pictured), Peter Brennan, Tom Jones, Michael Grant, Nick Potamitis, and Adam Simmonds. For more information on each of these poets, and their latest collections, see the Perdika website.
Free
Reading by SUSANNA CLARKE Monday 19th Nov., 8pm Junior Parlour
In 2004, her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published. Widely acclaimed, it tells the story of two magicians in early 19th-century London and was shortlisted for the 2004 Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread First Novel Award. Her most recent book is The Ladies of Grace Adieu (2006), a collection of short stories.
Free for Trinity students (£1 other)
Reading by JOANNE LIMBURG Wednesday 24th Oct., 8pm Junior Parlour
Free for Trinity students (£1 other)
Talk by theatre director STEPHEN UNWIN Thursday 18th Oct., 8pm Old Combination Room
Before 1993, Stephen worked as a freelance theatre and opera director, with productions at the National Theatre, the Royal Court, Garsington Opera, English National Opera and the Royal Opera House. Stephen has also written several books including: A Pocket Guide to Shakespeare’s Plays, A Pocket Guide to Twentieth Century Drama, A Pocket Guide to Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, So You Want to be a Theatre Director?, and A Guide to the Plays of Bertolt Brecht. His many awards include Joint Winner of the Shakespeare Globe Sam Wanamaker Award in 2003.
He will be discussing his approach to directing, in particular his production of Middleton's and Rowley's famous Jacobean tragedy The Changeling, which comes to the Cambridge Arts Theatre in October (information and booking).
Free
Reading by SARAH HALL Monday 28th May 2007, 8pm Old Combination Room
Her first novel, Haweswater, was published in 2002. It is set in the 1930s, focuses on one family - the Lightburns - and is a rural tragedy about the disintegration of a community of Cumbrian hill-framers, due to the building of a reservoir. It won several awards, including the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best First Book). Her second book, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set in the turn-of-the-century seaside resorts of Morecambe Bay and Coney Island, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). Free
Poetry Reading by JO SHAPCOTT Wednesday 14th March 2007, 8pm Old Combination Room
From 2001-2003, during the BBC Proms season, she presented the weekly 'Poetry Proms' on Radio 3.
She teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London and is also Visiting Professor in Poetry at the University of Newcastle and the University of the Arts, London. She is Consulting Editor for Arc Publications. The Transformers (published later this year) is a collection of public lectures given by Jo Shapcott as part of her Professorship at Newcastle.
Tickets: £2 (free for Trinity students)
Poetry Reading by JACOB POLLEY Monday 19th February 2007, 8pm Old Combination Room
Free.
Poetry Reading by KATHLEEN JAMIE Wednesday 31st January 2007, 8pm Old Combination Room
Her latest poetry collection, The Tree House (2004), won the 2004 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year) and the 2005 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. She lives in Fife and in 1999 was appointed Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University.
Tickets: £2 (Free for Trinity Students)
An Evening with SIR ARNOLD WESKER Monday 22nd January 2007, 8-10pm Old Combination Room
Sir Arnold will be giving a two hour reading, with a fifteen minute interval, which will include a complete reading of Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon (1986).
EDITING SHELLEY: a talk by Professor Kelvin Everest Monday 27th November 2006, 8pm Junior Parlour
Poetry Reading by SEAN O'BRIEN Monday 6th November 2006, 8pm Frazer Room (behind the college chapel)
Well known for his work on both radio and television, Sean O'Brien's poetry collections include The Indoor Park (1983), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, The Frighteners (1987), HMS Glasshouse (1991), and Ghost Train (1995), which won the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), as did Downriver (2001), making him the first poet to have won this prize twice. Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 was published in 2002. Inferno, his verse version of Dante's Inferno, is published in 2006 and a new poetry collection, Manifest, in 2007. His poems have been included in many anthologies, such as the 2006 British Council/Granta publication New Writing 14, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw and Helon Habila.
Sean won an Eric Gregory Award in 1979 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1988, both awarded by the Society of Authors, and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Vice President of the Poetry Society.
MARIO PETRUCCI reads from Catullus, his new poetry collection Monday 23rd October 2006, 8pm Junior Parlour
An Evening with LOUIS DE BERNIERES Tuesday 9 May 2006, 7.30pm Old Combination Room
Louis will read from his work-in-progress.
Women and the "Space Off": ALI SMITH and HELEN OYEYEMI in conversation about women's fiction Wednesday 3 May 2006, 8pm Old Combination Room
Helen and Ali will consider (among other things) the difference between 'feminine' and 'masculine' styles of writing, whether women's fiction can cross cultural boundaries in ways that men's fiction cannot, whether madness is subversive and to any extent part of being female, and how much literary constructs of gender matter anyway.
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Carol
Rumens is the author of 15 collections of poems, the latest being
Blind Spots (2008), as well as occasional fiction, drama and
translation. She has received the Cholmondeley Award and the Prudence
Farmer Prize, and was joint recipient of an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award.
Her most recent publication is the prose book, Self into Song,
based on three poetry lectures delivered in the Bloodaxe-Newcastle
University Lecture Series. She is currently professor in creative
writing at the University of Wales, Bangor, and is a fellow of the Royal
Society of Literature. 
Jamie
McKendrick is the author of five collections of poetry: The
Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The
Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry
Collection of the Year) and a Poetry Book Society Choice; Ink Stone
(2003), shortlisted for the 2003 T. S. Eliot Prize and the 2003
Whitbread Poetry Award; and Crocodiles and Obelisks (2007),
shortlisted for this year's Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection
of the Year). His selected poems have been published in Holland and
Italy. 
Michael
O'Neill has lectured at Durham University since 1979, where he is a
Professor of English. He co-founded and co-edited Poetry Durham from
1982 to 1994. His critical studies include The All-Sustaining Air
(OUP, 2007), an exploration of Romantic poetry's influence on poets
since 1900. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 1983 for his poetry and
a Cholmondeley Award for Poets in 1990. His first collection The
Stripped Bed was published by Collins Harvill in 1990, and his new
collection, Wheel, is published by Arc this autumn.
Alice
Oswald lives in Dartington, Devon. She trained as a classicist and was
the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 1994. Her first collection of
poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), includes poems
reflecting her love of gardening and the entertaining long poem, 'The
Men of Gotham'. This collection won a Forward Poetry Prize (Best First
Collection) in 1996, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in
1997. 
TCLS
welcomes back Jacob
Polley, former Fellow Commoner of Creative Arts at Trinity, and one of this country's youngest and brightest poetic talents.
He had two poems in Faber’s 1998 publication, First
Pressing, and in 2002 he won the BBC Radio 4/Arts Council of England
‘First Verse’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award. The Brink, his
first collection, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. His second
collection, Little Gods, was published in December 2006. 
For
over 30 years, Jeffrey Archer has delighted his fans and defied his
critics. The life peer and former Conservative MP has been published in 63
countries and more than 32 languages, with international sales passing 125
million copies. 
Internationally-acclaimed
poet and critic Anne Stevenson was born in Cambridge, but was raised and
educated in the United States. If Stevenson's early poetry sometimes
shares a technique with Plath, addressing subjects both personally and
ambivalently, in recent years she has developed an ear for lyrical
expression while turning her attention to the paradoxical nature of
experience and to a delight in the music of language. She is author of
over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as two critical studies of
Elizabeth Bishop's work, and the controversial biography of Sylvia Plath, Bitter
Fame (1989). In autumn 2007 she was awarded three major prizes in her
native USA: the $200,000 Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry, a
Neglected Masters Award from the Poetry Foundation of Chicago, and The
Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry. 
Perdika
Press present editions of original and translated works by contemporary
poets. The distinctiveness of each collection is complemented by a
commitment to scrupulous innovation, a refashioning of language of and
for its time.
Susanna
Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1959, and spent her childhood in Northern
England and Scotland. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at
St. Hilda’s College, Oxford and taught in Turin and Bilbao for two
years, before becoming an editor at Simon and Schuster in Cambridge,
working on their cookery list. She is the author of seven short stories
and novellas, published in anthologies in the USA. One of her short
stories, ‘The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse’ was published in
a limited edition, and her story 'Mr. Simonelli or The Fairy Widower' was
shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award 2001.
Joanne
Limburg was born in London in 1970, and studied Philosophy at Cambridge.
She has since gained an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies, and now works as an
Associate Lecturer for the Open University. She won an Eric Gregory Award
for her poetry in 1998, and her first book, Femenismo (Bloodaxe,
2000), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.
Her second collection, Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe, 2007), came out
earlier this year.
Stephen
Unwin is one of the country’s leading theatre directors, and since founding
English Touring Theatre in 1993, he has directed most of the company’s
productions.
Sarah
Hall was born in Cumbria in 1974. She took a degree in English and Art
History at Aberystwyth University, and began to take writing seriously
from the age of twenty, first as a poet, several of her poems appearing in
poetry magazines, then as a fiction-writer. She took an M Litt in Creative
Writing at St Andrew's University and stayed on for a year afterwards to
teach on the undergraduate Creative Writing programme.
Jo
Shapcott's has also won the National Poetry Competition twice. Her first
collection Electroplating the Baby (1988,) won the Commonwealth
Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and was followed up by Phrase
Book (1992), and My Life Asleep (1998), which won the Forward
Poetry Prize (Best Collection). A selection of poems from these three
works made up Her Book: Poems 1988-1998 (2000). Her book Tender
Taxes, a collection of versions of Rainer Maria Rilke's poems in
French, was published in 2002. 
Kathleen
Jamie has published several collections of poetry, including: Black
Spiders (1982), The Way We Live (1987), The Queen of
Sheba (1994), and Jizzen (1999). A travel book about Northern
Pakistan, The Golden Peak (1993), was recently updated and reissued
as Among Muslims (2002). She has received several prestigious
awards for her poetry, including a Somerset Maugham Award, a Forward
Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem), a Paul Hamlyn Award and a Creative
Scotland Award. She has twice also won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
Her selected poems, Mr & Mrs Scotland Are Dead (2002), which
contains much of her work written before 1994, was shortlisted for the
Griffin Poetry Prize.
Wesker
is considered one of the key figures in 20th Century drama. He is the
author of 42 plays, 4 volumes of short stories, 2 volumes of essays, a
book on journalism, a children's book, extensive journalism, poetry and
other assorted writings. His plays have been translated into 17
languages, and performed worldwide. Associated with a number of
movements - The Angry Young Men, Kitchen-Sink drama, naturalism - but
rejecting all these labels, he grew up in the East End of London and
emerged as a dramatist in 1957 with The Kitchen. This was
followed by what critics regard as his masterpiece: 'The Wesker Trilogy'
(Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958; Roots, 1959; I'm
Talking About Jerusalem, 1960). The trilogy, which drew on Wesker's
working class Jewish background, was first performed in its entirety at
the Royal Court Theatre in 1960. Other important plays include Love
Letters on Blue Paper (1976) and Caritas (1980), both of
which have been staged at the National Theatre, and also Shylock (1976)
- Wesker's famous take on The Merchant of Venice. 
Kelvin
Everest has published widely on Romantic topics, including books on
Coleridge and on the historical context of English Romanticism, and
several edited volumes of essays. In 2000 the second volume of his edition
of Shelley's poetry appeared in the Longman Annotated English Poets
series, and he is currently working on the third and final volume of this
edition. He is A.C. Bradley Professor of Modern Literature at the
University of Liverpool, and is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the
University.
He
is also a prolific writer of essays, short stories, and plays. Keepers
of the Flame, a verse play set in the 1930s and 1990s about poetry
and Fascism was staged at Live Theatre in association with the RSC in
2003; The Birds, his new verse version of Aristophanes'
Birds, was commissioned by the National Theatre in London, first
staged at the Lyttelton Theatre in 2002 and revived by Threeoverden
theatre company in a tour of North East England in 2006. He has
dramatised and adapted novels for broadcast as BBC Radio 4 Classic
Serials, including Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (2004) and Graham
Greene's Ministry of Fear (2006).
LOUIS
DE BERNIERES' novels include The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts
(Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book Eurasia Region, 1991),
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book
Eurasia Region, 1992), and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.
He was selected by Granta as one of the twenty Best of Young British
Novelists in 1993. Captain Corelli's Mandolin won the Commonwealth
Writers Prize, Best Book, in 1995, and in 2001 was turned into a
successful feature film starring starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope
Cruz. Louis de Bernieres' latest novel, Birds Without Wings, was
published in July 2004. 
ALI
SMITH's first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is
also the author ofLike (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999);
Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and
the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award, the East England Arts
Award of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award
in 2002; and The Whole Stories and Other Stories (2003). Her most recent
novel, The Accidental (2005), won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award,
was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has been longlisted for the
Orange Prize.
HELEN
OYEYEMI was born in Nigeria in 1984 and moved to London when she was
four. She wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while at school
working for her A levels, and is now studying Social and Political
Sciences at Corpus Christi College. She has been nominated for the 2006
British Book Awards Decibel Writer of the Year Award. The Icarus Girl,
described by The Sunday Times as 'a highly auspicious fictional debut'
and by The Telegraph as 'an astonishing achievement', has recently
appeared in paperback.