Award-winning novelist Kamila Shamsie will give the University’s T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture on 7 June.
Kamila, who was recently appointed as the inaugural New Imaginaries Fellow for the University’s Migration and Movement Signature Research Theme, will also lead a cross-disciplinary workshop (8 June) for colleagues and students on the implications for human movement of her novel Home Fire.
The title of her lecture is ‘Waking alone/ At the hour when we are/Trembling with tenderness/Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone’: Literature’s power and powerlessness’.
Jointly hosted by the University’s School of English and its Institute for Cultural and Creative Industries, the lecture will take place at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre from 7.30pm – 8.30pm. Ticket details are available on our events site.
Kamila Shamsie is the author of seven novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Hellenic Prize, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Burnt Shadows won the Premio Boccaccio (Italy) and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction; A God in Every Stone was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature (India). A Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, she was one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 2013. She grew up in Karachi, and now lives in London. Her next novel, Best of Friends, will be published this autumn.
The annual T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture has been hosted by the University since 1967. Previous speakers have included W.H. Auden, Edward Said, Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney, Kamau Brathwaite and Marina Warner. 2022 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Eliot’s major poem, The Waste Land.