University of Kent

Applause for night of poetry and prose

Story published at 10:37am 13 March 2007

More than 70 people turned up to enjoy the evening of poetry and prose staged by the University’s Tonbridge Centre and the School of English last Wednesday (7 March).

Authors Susan Wicks, Patricia Debney and Sarah Salway, who all teach at the University, read pieces from their various published works. In between, Kent students read extracts from Night Train 4, their own annually published collection of creative writing.

Tonbridge Centre Administrator and co-organiser Karon Kullman said the evening was well received by both fellow students and the public. ‘The evening of poetry and prose was the third event of its kind to be staged at the Angel Centre, Tonbridge, in what has become something of an annual celebration of talented writing from within the University,’ she said.

‘Many people remarked on how inspiring they found the event and how it fired them up with enthusiasm for their own creative work.’

Copies of Night Train 4 are still available at £6.00, directly from the Tonbridge Centre or the School of English. Alternatively, they are available by post for £7.50, including postage and packing, from the Centre for Creative Writing, School of English, Rutherford College Extension, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NX.

Contact will also be welcomed by those interested in finding out details of the University’s Creative Writing courses.

For more information about the Tonbridge Centre’s range of study opportunities, please call 01732 352316, email

tonbridgeadmin@kent.ac.uk or log on to www.kent.ac.uk.

Book Launch and poetry reading: Susan Wicks with Carole Satyamurti

On 27th February Susan Wicks will launch her fifth volume of poetry, De-iced, published by Bloodaxe Books. Susan is a widely celebrated poet and novelist, and Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University. Among many distinctions she has won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and an earlier volume of poetry, The Clever Daughter was a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot and the Forward Prizes.

Carole Satyamurti's poetry explores love, attachment and the fragility of personal survival, charting the tension between connected and separate lives. She is the author of Stitching the Dark: New and Selected Poems and Love and Variations.

The event is made possible through the generous support of the Centre for Creative Writing and the Centre for Gender , Sexuality and Writing and takes place in Keynes Staff Common Room from 7.00-9.00pm and is free of charge

Night Train 4

Night Train, our annual anthology of student writing, is to be launched at a party in the Gulbenkian Cafe-Bar on Monday November 20th at 6 pm. Tickets, priced at £6, include a copy of the anthology (normally £6) and a first glass of wine, and are available from the Gulbenkian box-office now.

The anthology contains 11 complete, professionally written short stories, with framing sections of varied poetry and lively short prose, all written by students on our Creative Writing modules, from First Year and Certificate levels to Postgraduate.

Copies are now available, price £6 or £10 for two, from the School of English Office, or by post from The Centre for Creative Writing, School of English, Rutherford College, University of Kent, Canterbury CT2 7NX. Please add £1 or £1.50 (2 copies) for postage and packing. Cheques to be made out to Unikent.

Marilyn Hacker, acclaimed poet and author of Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons, will read from her work.
Thursday 19 October 2006, 7pm. Tickets (in advance, £5.00, cheques made payable to ‘UNIKENT’). Enquiries: english@kent.ac.uk

Tsitsi Dangarembga

The author of Nervous Conditions, read from her new novel, The Book of Not.

To read more about the author pleaseclick here

EMBodied: A Colloquium on the Early Modern Body

Wednesday 6 December, 11 – 4
With papers by Elaine Hobby (University of Loughborough), Nicky Hallett (University of Kent) and Felicity Dunworth (Canterbury Christchurch University)
Enquiries: english@kent.ac.uk

In October 2005 the University of Kent hosted Dream writing a two day conference ...

April 2003: An international, interdisciplinary conference organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH) at the University of Kent

Open Lecture, Ian Gregor Lecture, Friday 11th March, 2005Professor John Sutherland, University College, London

'What do we 'see' in Victorian fiction', John Sutherland is the former Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and has been a visiting professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology. He has published many books and articles on a variety of subjects, the majority concentrating on Victorian fiction, the history of publishing and twentieth-century literature. His books include The Literary Detective (Oxford, 2000), Reading the Decades (BBC Books, 2002) and Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (Viking, 2004). John Sutherland also writes an extremely popular weekly column for The Guardian.

March 12th, 2005, London SpitLit festival ('Celebrating Women's Writing) on 'Gendering Poetry' - with Vicki Bertram and Moniza Alvi and Jan Montefiore. For more information please click here.

April 7, 2005, 7:30 pm, Royal Festival Hall , Patience Agbabi, Kwame Dawes, Jackie Kay and Jack Mapanje (Africa 2005 Series)
Four of the finest poets celebrate their African connections. Patience Agbabi is one of the most dynamic performers of her own poetry. She has published two collections of poetry: R.A.W. and Transformatrix, and 'she often adapts sonnets and sestinas to her own gender-bending sexual politics' (Jules Smith). Patience was born in London to Nigerian parents and grew up in North Wales.

Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana and grew up in Jamaica. He has published nine collections of poetry. His first, Progeny of Air, won the 1994 Forward Prize for Best First Collection and in 2001 he was awarded a Push Cart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001. Dawes' anthology of reggae poetry, Wheel and Come Again, is the standard work, and he is the leading critic of the reggae aesthetic. His novel Biouac is due in 2005.

The poems in Jackie Kay's new collection, Life Mask, were inspired by her meeting with her Nigerian father who she first met two years ago. Like her previous work her poems deal with the issues with toughness and humour. She fictionalised her own life for the award-winning collection, The Adoption Papers, the story of a black girl adopted by a white Glaswegian couple.

Jack Mapanje was jailed in Malawi for writing poetry that offended dictator Hastings Banda. He lives in exile in York, and teaches at Newcastle University. His poems are often deadly serious, but are lifted by the generosity of spirit and irrepressible humour that sustained him through his ordeal. Please click here for more information

Open Inaugural Lecture: The Return of the Native: reflections on travel and writing
On Friday 5 November, 2004, Rod Edmond, Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History at the University of Kent, gave an Open Inaugural Lecture titled The Return of the Native: reflections on travel and writing. This lecture considered how the experience of confronting non-European cultures caused traveller writers to reflect upon and reassess their home culture.

Night Train 2
This year for the first time the School of English has produced a comprehensive anthology of work by students on the Creative Writing programme. Night Train 2 was launched on 7 October, 2004. The occasion coincided with National Poetry Day and was also a celebration of student success in this year's T S Eliot Poetry competition.

Two international one-day colloquia on Literature and the Humanities at Kent in January and June 2004. The colloquia, organised by Sarah Wood and backed by the School of English and KIASH, brought together leading figures in the departments of English, Film and Philosophy at Kent, with visitors Graham Allen (Cork), Rupert Read (East Anglia), Nicholas Royle (Sussex), Simon Morgan-Wortham (Portsmouth) and Roy Sellars (South Denmark) to address contemporary institutional and intellectual concerns in the light of creative modern thinking about literature, film and philosophy.

If you would like to read some extracts from the Anthology please click here