Category: Insights

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Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Modernism

Reflecting on This Year’s Ivan Juritz Prize

By Imogen Free

Nick Makoha’s ‘A Low-Pressure System’ moves through the past towards mythology; it is a personal journal that resists any fixity, but instead is a series, as Ivan Juritz Prize judge, Will Eaves notes, ‘perpetually in flight’. This retelling of the events related to the Entebbe hijacking in 1976 is paralleled against a series of flights from Nick’s own experience, and despite writing through dramatic historical events, his moving voice can be felt strongly throughout. This became particularly evident when listening to him read from Codex 2 during our prizegiving event at the end of June. Codex 2 is a poem about his father’s personal and political life; reading from it, we saw him half-smile as he came to the last line: ‘I had a small nonspeaking part’.

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Culture, Text and History Early Modern and Shakespeare Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Reform, Rejection, and Renewal: Findings from the Shakespeare in the Royal Collection

By Kirsten Tambling and Sally Barnden

Dr Kirsten Tambling and Dr Sally Barnden, postdoctoral research associates on the AHRC-funded project ‘Shakespeare in the Royal Collection’, discuss their work and findings ahead of the launch of their online database and exhibition on the 15th of July.

Kirsten: In 2018, Cole Moreton wrote a piece for the ‘i’ on the ‘transformation’ of Prince Harry. Arguing that ‘Prince Harry’s transformation from wild child to hero is uncannily like that of Shakespeare’s warrior Hal’, Moreton traces the trajectory of the Prince of Wales’s second son from tearaway teenager – sent to rehab for smoking cannabis – to one of the royal family’s most popular members, alongside that of Prince Hal of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2.

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Insights Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Book Release: Daughters of the Labyrinth by Professor Ruth Padel, King’s College London

Book Release 1/7/21: Daughters of the Labyrinth by Ruth Padel, Professor of Poetry, King’s College London.

‘A daughter’s passionate quest for the truth about what happened to her parents in Crete during the German occupation and a sumptuous and sensuous evocation of Crete itself, its landscape and culture. ’ – Colm Tóibín

‘She winds us into coils within coils of a family’s dark history, horrific suffering and intimate sacrifice. She combines dramatic storytelling with moving reflectiveness, asking us to think again about whether it is better to remember or forget?’ – Marina Warner

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Insights

My first days as co-editor!

My first days as co-editor!

Thank you to both Katie Arthur and Harriet Thompson for their work together as editors of the King’s English Blog – replacing them is going to be a tough ask!

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Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theory Insights

Thinking in Crisis Times: A Collective Exploration by the English Department

Thinking in Crisis Times: A Collective Exploration by the English Department 2020-21.

For Thinking in Crisis Times, students at King’s responded to the first term’s readings with a series of poems (see https://thinking-in-crisis-times-a-collective-exploration.webnode.com/history/).

In the Spring term, a call was issued for submissions on the topic of the Extra/Ordinary, which elicited a range of powerful work in the form of writing and images.

The selected submissions for Thinking in Crisis Times on the topic of the Extra/Ordinary are:

Rosemary’s Bodies by Sarah Arnold, Body Talk by Finlay Cousins and Living in lock-down by Lauren Mappledoram.

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