For diplomats coming to the court of Charles I, it was more than a case of knocking at the door and being shown in. In this Late Summer Lectures podcast, Kimberley Foy uses the experience of visiting ambassadors to show how attending the court of Charles I involved a carefully choreographed set of moves, through particular spaces. For more informat…

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Kathleen Foy from Durham University explains how James Shirley’s 1639 tragedy The Politician reflected the court and politics of Charles I. For more information and an accessible transcript, visit our blog.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Dr Amanda Blake Davis of the University of Sheffield takes us on a flight through birds and embodiment in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. For more information, and an accessible transcript, visit: https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/?p=30434…

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Alex Hobday (University of Cambridge) examines how eighteenth-century culture sought to answer that eternal question: what is happiness, and how can we achieve it? For more information, and an accessible transcript, visit: https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/?p=30441…

In a wide-ranging interview, Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley explains how literary characters take on a life of their own, reflects on the representation of the body in literature, and examines her own status as a female novelist emerging in the 1970s. This conversation between Dr Jennifer Terry and Jane Smiley was recorded at the Liter…

The Centre for Poetry and Poetics held an evening to celebrate the poetry and influence of T.S. Eliot. Dr Gareth Reeves and Professor Jason Harding, two scholars who specialise in Eliot’s life and works, read from Eliot's own poetry and that of later poets such as Donald Davie and Hart Crane who were inspired by him. Find out more at READ: Research…

John Clegg’s first collection, Antler, features prehistoric landscapes, folk tale and myth. John’s reading includes a history of a city in four stanzas, and the story of an “ice road trucker.” John Clegg’s poetry is published by and copyright of Salt Publishing. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.…

Gareth Reeves’ third collection, To Hell With Paradise: New and Selected Poems, has just been published by Carcanet. In this reading from the collection, Gareth adopts a range of intriguing perspectives and voices, including that of a cash machine looking at a man trying to withdraw his money, and Dimitri Shostakovich thinking about bird droppings.…

Two of the Department’s published poets, Gareth Reeves and his PhD student John Clegg, explore how their writing of poetry relates to their research. They explain how they began writing poetry rather than writing about poetry, and discuss how writing poetry gives them unique insights into the forms and methods employed in the work of other poets. F…

A century and a half since his birth, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats is one of the best-loved in the English language, known for his lyric poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innishfree’ or for romantic poems like ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’ Throughout his literary career, though, Yeats wrote in a range of styles and on diverse subjects. His poems…

Celebrate the literature and legacy of the Brontë sisters in this podcast, recorded around the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, which features readings from and commentaries on their ground-breaking, powerful, and influential novels and poems. Works featured include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette alongside the poetry and prose of…

We humans are creatures of the land, who usually observe the sea from above its surface. Beneath the surface, though, the sea looks, sounds and feels like a distinct and unique environment. The poet Sarah Hymas invites us beneath the waves, to perceive the sea and the interrelationship between sea and land, between it and us, in deep and immersive …

Albion. Today that word conjures impressions of a lost, utopian version of Britain – but the story of Albion as it was originally told in the middle ages is anything but beautiful. According to the early Brut chronicle, Albion was first discovered by a group of sisters who then propagated with the wandering devils they found there, spawning a race …

A king sits by the fire in a peasant’s cottage, brooding on the problems of his kingdom. Suddenly the smell of burning fills the air. The cakes left there by his host have been ruined. The king, of course, is Alfred the Great. But this apocryphal story is just one of many not entirely true tales that have surrounded this Anglo Saxon monarch through…

Do you get annoyed when people rustle their crisp packets or check their mobile phones in the theatre? If so you’re probably not alone – but you might be surprised to learn that the convention that audiences should be quiet is a relatively new one. It's also a norm that may exclude spectators who can't help but fidget and make noise. Hannah Simpson…

The idea of genetic engineering may conjure visions of futuristic horror, such as mutant human beings with peculiar powers. But some novels and stories, particularly within utopian literature, imagine more positive trends in human development, whether driven by science or natural evolution over time. In this podcast, Sarah Lohmann considers the com…

In 1592 the face of theatre changed forever. From the death of Julius Caesar and its wide political ramifications, to the love between Antony and Cleopatra played out on an epic scale, tragic drama had traditionally been associated with the lives of noble characters drawn from a ruling elite. But the anonymous play The Tragedy of Master Arden of Fa…

The word ‘romance’ conjures images of men and women meeting one another and falling helplessly in love. But if we trace the literature of ‘romance’ back to its roots in the medieval period, we encounter many stories where chivalric knights and ladies refuse or fail to conform to convention. Hannah Piercy takes us on a tour through some of this hist…

Durham University’s Palace Green Library is home to many medieval manuscripts, but among the most precious is one of just three surviving collections of poetry written by the hand of one Thomas Hoccleve – fourteenth-century civil servant, letter writer, and poet. Laurie Atkinson puts some of Hoccleve’s literary output under the reading lamp, as he …

“Poetry doesn’t ask you how old you are at the door”, says Caroline Bird, reflecting on the fact that her first collection, Looking at Letterboxes, was published when she was aged just 15. Since then, Caroline has authored four more collections, won numerous awards, and been the official poet of the London Olympics – great hallmarks indeed, but in …

Imagine yourself immersed in a beautiful landscape, and being moved by the view before your eyes. To remember the experience, perhaps you might take a photograph. But while a photograph can snap a single moment, a still image doesn’t really reflect the way your original experience unfolded through time. Can writing achieve something different? Both…

Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life. What differentiates American writers from their English literary counterp…

There can be few things in life more tragic than the death of a child. Not surprisingly, when this is represented in literature, the deathbed scene will surely be poignant, empathetic and emotionally memorable. But as Morven Cook and Oliver Hancock discuss in conversation together, nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century texts are very differen…

“Vivam!” “I will live.” The final word of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, proclaiming the poet’s hope that he will continue to be known through his great work. It’s a prediction that of course turns out to be true, as we’re still reading and influenced by the Metamorphoses 2000 years after it was written. In this podcast, Simona Martorana helps us to appreci…

When we say that a theatre performance ‘brought the house down’, we usually don’t mean that literally. But in the case of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, or as it’s sometimes known, All is True, the phrase really does apply. In a performance in 1613 a stray spark from a cannon ignited a fire that burned the Globe Theatre to the ground. In fact, thro…

When we listen to classical music, some of us might think we hear a story in the melody - but others will not. Some of us might know about the life of the composer and project their biography onto the piece – but others will listen with ears unbiased by context. The problem is that meaning doesn’t actually live anywhere that can be pinpointed in a …

Think of a medieval romance, and you might imagine brave courtly knights dashing to the rescue of women held captive by monstrous beasts and dragons. But think again. Olivia Colquitt introduces us to the 14th-century Mélusine story, in which the beautiful woman is not all that she seems and it is the man who ends up in need of a rescuer. For more a…

Which breakfast cereal do you prefer: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs? It’s the sort of decision many of us face, bleary eyed, each morning. But if you watched Netflix’s interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, you might recognise that this is the first choice that viewers have to make when deciding how the story of the protagonist will unfold. …

"Marley's ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature enquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, 'Was it a dream or not?." Scrooge's internal debate accurately reflects the mid-Victo…

As a poet, if you cooperate with language you end up ‘saying things you didn’t know you were thinking.’ So claims the multi-award-winning poet Rachael Boast, in this interview with Suzannah V. Evans. But although poetry may emerge from somewhere unconscious, the course of their conversation draws to the surface Rachael’s life and works. Read more a…

The debate surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union exposed, among other things, a suspicion of ‘experts.’ How did intellectuals become alienated figures? And how might citizens and academics come together in order to better understand the attitudes and experiences of the other? English lecturer Simon Grimble reflects on why despite b…

It can seem dauntingly difficult for a young poet to gain a name and to get published by a respected press or magazine. But that’s exactly what Will Harris has achieved with his 2017 pamphlet All this is implied, a collection that explores the complexities of being a person of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage. In this conversation with Suzannah V. E…

On June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris, Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left teetering at the top. The following year, Dickens would publish his mo…

In reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of the past, often encountering them in that strange meeting room represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from classical G…

Polly Atkin published her first full length poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, in 2017. Like her two pamphlets before it – bone song (2008) and Shadow Dispatches (2013) – Basic Nest Architecture won critical acclaim, including New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize. Suzannah V. Evans chatted with Polly about the roots of her poetic li…

All the world’s a stage – one of Shakespeare’s more famous sayings, and perhaps now almost a cliché. However, Helen Clifford uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to cast a new light on how Shakespeare’s stage and language are indeed bounded to coordinates in the world. His metaphors often ask us to imaginatively look up or dow…

When she was growing up in rural New Jersey, JL Williams wrote a play about pirates. Today, Williams is best known as a poet, but she has continued to sail across various genres, including visual arts, dance, theatre, and, most recently, opera. Although Williams may have put pirates long behind her, associations with the sea, and the dramatic portr…

An island nation that wants to be involved in the politics of wider Europe, but also removed from it. A fractious debate over power, sovereignty, the rule of law. The experiences of emigrants and immigrants. Not a potted summary of twenty-first century political events, but rather of the themes raised by the thirteenth-century Icelandic poem, Egil’…

Gillian Allnutt is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Wake, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Ahead of its publication, Suzannah V. Evans caught up with Gillian Allnutt at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, to reflect on her career in writing and to hear her read from some of her earlier work. For more about…

Sound is part of our everyday life experience, but it’s hard to understand and define its meaning and workings; sound can feel strange or unfamiliar when we try to put it into words. Professor Helen Abbott, a specialist in nineteenth-century French poetry and music at the University of Birmingham, introduces us to various ways we might grasp on wha…

The title of Liz Berry’s first, multi-award-winning poetry collection, Black Country, signals her place of birth - and unsurprisingly the book was described by reviewers as a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’. A more symbolic place is visited in her second pamphlet, The Republic of Motherhood, which maps the transformative experienc…

Listen to Aurélia Lassaque, a French poet and performer who writes, sings, and speaks in French, English and Occitan – a language spoken in parts of Southern France, Northern Spain and Italy. In this podcast you’ll hear her different uses of voice as she reads and sings her work, and then an interview with Suzannah V. Evans in which they discuss th…

Meet Arya Thampuran and Katie Harling-Lee, two PhD researchers who have particular interests in contemporary fiction, and who have set up a new network to draw you into the conversation as well. For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7qm and https://modcondurham.wordpress.com/

In December 2018 we lost our colleague, teacher and friend Professor Michael O’Neill. Just before he died, Michael had completed his fifth collection of poetry, Crash and Burn and so, at a poignant poetry reading, we were able to remember Michael by celebrating the launch of this posthumous new work, while also looking back at his earlier poetry an…

Are philosophy and literature two distinct disciplines, divided by a common language? Emphatically not, according to Michael Mack and Barry Stocker, editors of the new The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature. In this podcast, we caught up with Michael and Barry to learn how the power of the imagination, literary uses of language, and an …