The Few
November 2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. The RSL is marking this anniversary by looking back to Wilfred Owen’s words for peace, and looking forward to how poetry today can take us towards a more peaceful future. We have commissioned 14 of our poet Fellows to respond to Wilfred […]
White Sheets
November 2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. The RSL is marking this anniversary by looking back to Wilfred Owen’s words for peace, and looking forward to how poetry today can take us towards a more peaceful future. We have commissioned 14 of our poet Fellows to respond to Wilfred […]
Peace < Water
November 2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. The RSL is marking this anniversary by looking back to Wilfred Owen’s words for peace, and looking forward to how poetry today can take us towards a more peaceful future. We have commissioned 14 of our poet Fellows to respond to Wilfred […]
Naw dros heddwch/ Nine for Peace
November 2018 marks 100 years since the end of the First World War. The RSL is marking this anniversary by looking back to Wilfred Owen’s words for peace, and looking forward to how poetry today can take us towards a more peaceful future. We have commissioned 14 of our poet Fellows to respond to Wilfred […]
Literature Matters: The Stories that Shape Us
‘Creed. Colour. Country. Culture. All these things can become forms of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. But that’s not to deny that they can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can […]
Lifting the Curtain: Theatre and censorship
If we can’t be provocative in the theatre where can we be provocative. Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti Marking 50 years since the Lord Chamberlain was stripped of his power to censor plays, three theatre writers examine playwriting in the UK and freedom of expression. The panel, including director Sir Richard Eyre and playwrights Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, […]
Peace Poetry
BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinker Shahidha Bari chairs a conversation between three RSL poet Fellows, in which they consider Wilfred Owen’s life and death, and the relationship between poetry and peace in their own lifetimes. Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke’s work has been on the GCSE and A Level exam syllabus for the past […]
License to Kill?
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Feeling Jewish
In the wake of accusations of antisemitism in the British political sphere, four writers explore the portrayal of Jews in American literature and ask how such evocations might affect social perceptions. Zachary Leader is the biographer of Saul Bellow, whose Herzog and Sammler acquired iconic status. Devorah Baum lectures at the University of Southampton and […]
Picasso’s Faces
In his BBC series ‘The Face of Britain’ historian and writer Simon Schama explored British portraiture and what it revealed about the ‘individual and collective psyche’ of the time. With the NPG’s wide-ranging Autumn 2016 exhibition of Picasso’s portraits, he turns his attention to the painter’s evocations of lovers, family and friends. With writer and […]
The Good Immigrant
What does it mean to be an immigrant in the UK today? Journalist and BBC presenter Razia Iqbal chairs a discussion on immigration, race, identity and writing. Vahni Capildeo’s latest poetry collection, Measures of Expatriation, speaks of ‘the complex alienation of the expatriate’, and addresses wider issues around identity in contemporary Western society. Writer and […]
Sarah Losh: architect, antiquarian and visionary
Jenny Uglow celebrates National Women’s History Month, and its theme ‘women inspiring innovation through imagination’, with a talk about Sarah Losh, who built an extraordinary church in a village near Carlisle in the 1840s. As a woman innovator, Losh broke all conventions in designing the church, supervising its building, and even carving the alabaster – […]