Uploaded July 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Professor Sinéad Morrissey, Professor of Creative Writing, Newcastle University

According to Alexandra Harris, Chair of the Forward Prizes 2020: “In times of distraction [poetry] can carve out a space of concentration. Poems can shake or shock or magnetise our ideas into new configurations”.

In this lecture Professor Morrissey will consider poetry’s urgency during moments of heightened social and cultural crisis, and asking how the form and language of poetry, so often derided for being difficult, obtuse or ambiguous, is part of its necessary and magnetising effect.

The lecture will be followed by a live Q&A with the speaker.

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