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We are partnering with our friends at Newcastle Poetry Festival to present the Royal Society of Literature lecture, delivered this year by Sandeep Parmar FRSL. RSL Members and Fellows are entitled to free tickets.  For public tickets, and to see the rest of the festival programme, visit the Newcastle Poetry Festival website.

 

‘Motherhood, Whiteness and Empathy in Contemporary British Poetry’

This talk will consider how recent poetry stages racialised encounters in which the figure of the white mother is a complex conduit for empathy. Is this empathy meant to be radical? How might it fail? It will ask where and how this particular lyric subject operates across a postcolonial hierarchy as a proxy for the state and the security (or precarity) of its citizens.

Sandeep Parmar is a poet and essayist and author of a book on the modernist poet Mina Loy, and editions of Hope Mirilees and Nancy Cunard. She is Professor of English at Liverpool University and co-Director (with Deryn Rees-Jones) of the Centre for New and International Writing. Faust (2022) is her third poetry collection from Shearsman.

Preti Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University and is the winner of the Desmond Elliot for her novel, When We Were Young and the Gordon Burn Prize for Aftermath, her mixed genre meditation prompted by the London Bridge stabbings.