12 February 2025
from 5pm to around 6.30/6.45pm
Goldsmiths College, RHB 137
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Programme
Introduction
Amy Sackville, Isobel Hurst
Lecture
Dr Michael Simpson, “Olympoesis: Revisiting Public Poetry at the 2012 London Games”
(followed by Q&A)
Readings
Mary Ethna Black, “Dawn Weed Patrol”
Clara-Læïla Laudette, “Right ACL: total rupture; left ACL: total rupture”; “Ventolines”
Blake Morrison, “Bolt”
Elliot Smith, “The Beanbag Race”
The speakers
Michael Simpson is a Distinguished Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Comparative Literature. He has published widely on British Romanticism, including the book Closet Performances: Political Exhibition and Prohibition in the Dramas of Byron and Shelley. As a scholar of classical reception, Michael is collaborating with Barbara Goff on a major project provisionally titled ‘Working Classics: Greece, Rome, and Cultural Hinterlands of the British Labour Movement’. His latest publication with Barbara in this vein is the co-edited collection Classicising Crisis: the Modern Age of Revolutions and the Greco-Roman Repertoire (2021). Earlier joint publications include the monograph Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (2007) and the collection Thinking the Olympics: the Classical Tradition and the Modern Games (2011).
Mary Ethna Black is a globe-trotting doctor from Northern Ireland. She has raised two children with the oarsman who saved her life from pirates in the Bay of Bengal. Mary designed the NHS coordination centre for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic games, has managed three (unsuccessful) Olympic campaigns in sailing, and holds a silver medal in Serbia’s Microtonner class as Chief Ballast. Mary has won/listed for over 30 writing prizes. SPLAV – a love story/reflection on migration and home, centred round a century-old barge on the Sava in Belgrade – has just gone to publishers. Find out more about Mary’s work at www.madeleinemilburn.co.uk/mm-authors/mary-black/
Clara-Læïla Laudette is a writer and journalist. After reading English at Oxford, she studied Arabic in Palestine. She’s worked mainly in media, most recently as foreign correspondent for Reuters in Madrid. Clara-Læïla writes in English, French, Spanish, some Arabic. She won Magma Poetry’s 2023/24 Judge’s Prize and was shortlisted for the Oxford Poetry Prize and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her poems have been longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition and Mslexia’s Women’s Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in fourteen poems, Poetry Review, Propel Magazine, Oxford Poetry, Pulp Poets Press and Magma, among others..
Blake Morrison is an acclaimed writer of memoirs, fiction, poetry, journalism, literary criticism, libretti, and plays. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, former Chair of the Poetry Book Society and Vice-Chair of PEN – and former Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths. Among his works: And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Things My Mother Never Told Me, South of the River, The Executor, Two Sisters, Never the Right Time, Shingle Street, A Discoverie of Witches, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, and adaptations of Antigone and Oedipus Rex.
Elliot Smith read English at Girton College, Cambridge. He has worked as an actor, journalist and producer and is currently studying for an MA on the Creative and Life Writing course at Goldsmiths. He is interested in using poetry to explore unreliable memories and growing up in the 1990s. He lives with his family in south London.
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