Monday 20 May at 7pm, Royal Society of Arts, London. 

The Wanda Barford Memorial Poetry Lecture delivered by Anne Michaels.

‘Every poem is a poem of witness. Every poem, a form of rescue – from amnesia of every sort, from every kind of disregard and indifference. The hope of poems that witness war and political oppression is the assertion of justice spoken, spit in the eye of the oppressor, a message left for the others. And poems witness tyrannies less visible – illness, grief, shame, regret, terror, error, doubt. And others still, witness love that cannot wait – an entire life passes in a moment.

The poem says: precisely in the places where we feel most abandoned, we are not alone. No other public utterance so effectively names those places in us, and makes, in its precision, such ample space for both writer and reader. Here, the poem says, exactly in the place of dispossession – by a tyrant, by history, by a plan or policing, by chance, by time, by desire, by longing – exactly here and here and here, is the hope of being heard, and in that hope, solidarity. Every time we meet another’s gaze, here, in the poem, writer and reader, something is mended.’ – Anne Michaels

This lecture is in memory of musician and poet, Wanda Barford. There will be a reception following the talk, a free glass of wine is included.

Anne Michaels is a novelist and poet. Her books are translated into more than fifty languages and have won multiple awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow, and has served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. Her novel Fugitive Pieces was adapted as a feature film. Her most recent books include All We Saw, Infinite Gradation and Railtracks (co-written with John Berger). In 2020, her novel Fugitive Pieces was chosen as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World.

Wanda Barford was born in Milan, but as a child left Mussolini’s Italy with her parents for Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to escape anti-Jewish persecution. She eventually settled in London, where she studied the piano and became an Associate of the Royal College of Music. She has been a runner-up in the H. H. Wingate/Jewish Quarterly Poetry Competition, and her first collection, Sweet Wine and Bitter Herbs, was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize in 1997. Her second collection, A Moon at the Door, followed in 1999, a third, Losing, Finding, in 2002, and What Is the Purpose of Your Visit? in 2006. Her last two books were Wanted on Voyage (2010) and Shall Have to Stop Now (2017).