Celebrating its seventh year, the Newcastle Poetry Festival theme last year was ‘Community’, exploring poetry’s contribution to different communities and the power of writing collectives to encourage creativity.

As part of the festival on the 13 May, we introduced RSL Fellow Sandeep Parmar, who gave a lecture on ‘Motherhood, Whiteness and Empathy in Contemporary British Poetry’: considering how recent poetry stages racialised encounters in which the figure of the white mother is a complex conduit for empathy.

Please enjoy a recording of the fascinating talk below, introduced by RSL Fellow Preti Taneja.