The deadline for the 2013 prize is 15 October, and the judges include Jonathan Meades, Sarah Dunant, Jane Stevenson and Robert McCrum. We are very keen for MMU students to enter!
Details of the prize are here: http://www.anthonyburgess.org/about-the-foundation/observer-competition
April 26th, 2013 - 09:12am
David Cooper (Department of English, MMU Cheshire) was an invited speaker at ‘A Place for Words’: a one-day conference, held at the University of Edinburgh on 19 April, which brought together interpretation professionals, academics, curators and heritage managers to share experiences and practices of working on literature and place. The conference formed part of the AHRC-funded ‘Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland’ project run by the Universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham.
April 26th, 2013 - 08:58am
Professor Michael Symmons Roberts, Academic Director of the Manchester Writing School at MMU
**UPDATE** We are sorry to announce that Les Murray has had to return to Australia due to unforeseen circumstances, and will no longer be visiting the UK at this time. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. The event will continue with Michael reading from and talking about his work. - Carcanet Press
The Manchester Writing School at MMU, in association with the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and Carcanet, is proud to present two internationally acclaimed poets in this very special event.
When Michael Symmons Roberts published his first poetry collection Soft Keys it was Les Murray, Australia’s leading poet, who heralded him as ‘a poet for the new, chastened, unenforcing age of faith that has just dawned.’
Tonight’s event marks the launch of Drysalter, Michael’s sixth and most ambitious collection to date, and we are delighted to be bringing together both poets in Manchester to celebrate, to read from and to discuss their work. All welcome. This is event is free and there is no need to book.
Thursday 9th May 2013, 7pm
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Chorlton Mill, Cambridge Street, Manchester, M1 5BY (0161 235 0776)
Sponsored by MacDonald Hotels and Resorts: www.macdonaldhotels.co.uk
April 24th, 2013 - 17:26pm
Doonesbury: critical and cultural essays. An edited collection (MUP).
CALL FOR PAPERS.
For over four decades G.B. Trudeau’s Pulitzer prize-winning Doonesbury strip has reflected and refracted America’s national narratives, atomising and coalescing them within the strip format to a global audience. Chronicling, dramatising and defining key debates of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, Doonesbury has also intervened in and shaped their trajectory. Using representative form as a prism through which to explore, catalogue, landmark and define its contemporary moment, Doonesbury represents both a significant artistic, cultural and critical achievement.
Doonesbury’s status as a symptomatic corollary, imaginative rendition and cultural-historical document of America, as well as the strip’s diversity of interests, global reach, and cultural reception and standing, offer fertile grounds for fresh contemporary readings hitherto unfulfilled by academic engagement. Proposals are therefore invited for an edited collection of critical and cultural essays to be published through Manchester University Press that engage with the long-running, iconic strip.
The following themes are broadly suggested as points for discussion and points of departure for submitted proposals:
- Doonesbury: comedy and comment.
- Doonesbury’s narrative form: fragmentation, linearity and cohesion:
- Doonesbury 40: A Retrospective: the great American novel?
- Doonesbury and the American pastoral: from Thoreau to Walden commune and beyond.
- Doonesbury, representation, war and trauma: Vietnam, Iraq I, the war on terror, Iraq II, Afghanistan and the war within.
- Doonesbury and the comic tradition: art, satire, liberty and independence.
- Doonesbury’s and America’s political debates.
- Doonesbury and activism: civil and/or gay rights representation.
- Virtual Doonesbury: the daily strip and the dot com.
- Doonesbury, the counter-culture and the baby-boomers: from protest to Gen X.
- On the cover of Rolling Stone: Doonesbury, music, business and cultural representation.
- Bright Lights, Big City: Doonesbury and the eighties.
- Doonesbury and the American presidency: idealism, reality and representation.
- Doonesbury: humour, dissidence and censorship.
It must be stressed that these are only suggested areas of discussion and that proposals dealing with any aspect of the strip, or advancing alternative disciplinary or theoretical approaches will be considered.
Proposals should be no more than 800 words in length, and should be submitted to a.jackson@mmu.ac.uk no later than
Inquiries should also be addressed to a.jackson@mmu.ac.uk
April 17th, 2013 - 09:30am
A HAUNTING new project will give people in Manchester the chance to create a spirit or character which might take to the stage of Home, the new arts centre due to open in 2014.
‘The Spirit of Theatre’ is a research project run by MMU lecturer and script writer Julie Wilkinson. The investigating team will invite people to share their memories of the Library Theatre Company, which is moving to the new venue, and ask what it is that people value about watching a play.
Audiences at the Library Theatre Company’s current production of Mother Courage and Her Children, which runs at the company’s temporary home at The Lowry until 9 March, are asked to fill in a survey about their theatre experience. Those who are interested can go on to give face to face interviews and participate in workshops to create their own theatrical spirits.
The workshops, which will incorporate both art and creative writing, will take place in March and April.
Julie said: “The idea is to study how audiences value theatre. We want to hear what audiences remember about plays they have seen. What you remember straight after seeing a play may not be what sticks in the mind for longer. And this is an interesting time for theatre in Manchester, when the City Council have retained enough of their Arts budget to re-house the Library Theatre Company and Cornerhouse, showing just how important theatre and film are to the life and prosperity of the City. We hope to find ways to measure how people value the theatre beyond the monetary value it brings to the economy. One way to find out what audiences enjoy at the theatre is to invite them to invent their own imaginary beings which might inhabit our brand new Theatre.”
An additional survey of responses to theatre will go online at The British Theatre Consortium website later this month. Go to www.britishtheatreconference.co.uk
This project is a collaboration between the Departments of English, History, Art and Design, and the Business School at MMU, and the British Theatre Consortium, representing writers and academics from Warwick University, Royal Holloway University of London, the University of East Anglia and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.
Anybody interested in getting involved in The Spirit of Theatre project should email Julie Wilkinson on btctheatreghost@gmail.com
March 10th, 2013 - 16:56pm
AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow and MMU post-doc Graham Foster, is working with the archive at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. Over his time at the Foundation he will be producing a series of podcasts that will explore the archive, presenting thematic examinations of Burgess’s writing alongside excerpts from the music and spoken word collections. The first episode is now live, to stream or download, on the Burgess Foundation’s website and discusses Burgess and Dystopia.
March 10th, 2013 - 16:54pm
Here is an article published in the Yorkshire Post on Friday 1 March 2013:
One Hand Clapping, the first of the “Joseph Kell” novels, will be reprinted, with a new critical introduction by Andrew Biswell, on 14 March. The publisher is Serpent’s Tail, a division of Profile Books.
A stage version of One Hand Clapping, adapted by Lucia Cox (a graduate of MMU’s MA in Creative Writing) is being performed in Manchester on the evenings of 14, 15 and 16 March.
March 5th, 2013 - 18:28pm
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