[Ely Events] T S Eliot Festival 17 May 2008

[Simon Kershaw]

T S Eliot Festival
Little Gidding: 17 May 2008

Poetry enthusiasts of T S Eliot from across the country will gather at  
the tiny hamlet of Little Gidding for the third annual T S Eliot  
Festival, to be held on Saturday 17 May 2008. The festival programme  
includes inspiring talks and readings celebrating poetry and the work  
of T S Eliot.

The day’s programme begins with the annual Little Gidding Lecture, to  
be delivered by Peter Stanford, the authorised biographer of C Day- 
Lewis. Titled ‘On Not Saying Everything’, the talk will examine  
poetry’s role in capturing religious experience. The festival’s  
Keynote Speaker is Ingrid Soren, also known as Rosamond Richardson.  
Fresh from the International Symposium in Florence, Soren will deliver  
her paper ‘We Are Born With the Dead: A Conversation Between T S Eliot  
and Dante’. The day will conclude with an evening reading by the  
distinguished poet Sean O’Brien, the recipient of both the 2007 T S  
Eliot Prize and the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize.

Interspersed with audience readings, music, tea and a buffet supper,  
the festival promises to be an inspiring and convivial gathering at  
the beautiful setting of Little Gidding, which has remained virtually  
unchanged since T S Eliot visited and was inspired to write about it  
in the last of his most famous set of poems, Four Quartets.

A full day ticket is £25, and includes tea and supper. Separate  
tickets for the afternoon or evening events are also available at £10  
each. Further details about tickets and bookings can be obtained from info at ferrarhouse.co.uk 
. The event is expected to sell out well before the day, so book early  
to avoid disappointment!





Sean O’Brien, the first poet ever to win the UK’s two top poetry  
awards in the same year (the Forward and the T S Eliot Prize for The  
Drowned Book) will read from his poetry at the Festival this year.  
Sean O’Brien is a central figure in the contemporary poetry world. His  
poetry collections include The Indoor Park (1983), winner of a  
Somerset Maugham Award; The Frighteners (1987); HMS Glasshouse (1991);  
Ghost Train (1995); and Downriver (2001). Cousin Coat: Selected Poems  
1976–2001 was published in 2002. Inferno, his verse version of Dante’s  
Inferno, appeared in 2006. He is Professor of Creative Writing at  
Newcastle University and a Vice President of the Poetry Society. His  
poems have been included in many anthologies, such as the 2006 British  
Council/Granta publication New Writing 14, edited by Lavinia Greenlaw  
and Helon Habila. He is the author of a collection of essays about  
contemporary poetry, The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary  
British and Irish Poetry (1998) and edited the anthology The Firebox:  
Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (1998). He was awarded the E  
M Forster Award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993.

His short story publications include ‘I Cannot Cross Over’ in Hyphen:  
an anthology of short stories by poets (2003); ‘Tabs’ in Newcastle  
Stories (2005) and five stories in Ellipsis 1: Short Stories by Sean  
O'Brien, Jean Sprackland and Tim Cooke (2005).

Writer and journalist Peter Stanford will deliver the 2008 Little  
Gidding Lecture discussing Christian influence on poetry and  
literature. His numerous books include biographies of the Labour  
Cabinet minister and penal reformer Lord Longford; the Poet Laureate  
Cecil Day-Lewis; Bronwen Astor; and Cardinal Basil Hume. His writings  
on religion have ranged from The Devil: A Biography; Heaven: A  
Traveller’s Guide; The She-Pope: The Legend of Pope Joan to Catholics  
and Sex. His books have been translated into ten languages.

He has presented various television and radio documentaries, notably  
the award-winning Channel 4 series Catholics and Sex, BBC 1’s The She  
Pope, Channel 5’s The Mission, and has appeared as a panelist on the  
BBC series The Moral Maze, Vice or Virtue and FutureWatch. A former  
editor of the Catholic Herald (1988–92), he now writes for a variety  
of papers including the Independent on Sunday, the Observer, the Daily  
Mail and the Tablet.

Peter Stanford is chairman of the national spinal injuries charity,  
Aspire, and director of the Longford Trust which focuses on penal  
reform.

Ingrid Soren, this year’s Keynote Speaker, started her career in the  
BBC as a presenter of programmes for BBC Education. She has published  
over thirty non-fiction books under her real name Rosamond Richardson,  
an eclectic range including bereavement, roses, and life in an English  
village.
She has written books about the countryside, about vegetarian food  
(she was Linda McCartney’s food consultant) and about ecological  
living – her Organic Home is published by Dorling Kindersley. Natural  
Superwoman: a survival guide for women who have too much to do is an  
international bestseller and in its third edition.

In 2001 she took on the nom-de-plume Ingrid Soren. Her Zen of  
Horseriding was immediately published by Time Warner, sold to the USA  
and translated into Dutch and German. She has recently written Dante’s  
Cat, in which she has been supported and encouraged by the eminent  
Dantist Professor Robin Kirkpatrick, who recently translated the  
Divine Comedy for Penguin Classics.

Work-in-progress is a book also set in the fourteenth century, Queen  
Isabelle’s Confession, based on the mysterious events surrounding the  
death of King Edward II.




-- 
Simon Kershaw
simon at kershaw.org.uk
Saint Ives, Cambridgeshire

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