Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

We are honoured to announce that Elif Shafak will give this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on Thursday 24th October 2019 at 7.30pm in the Sheldonian Theatre.

Elif Shafak will deliver this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on the subject of literature, social change and politics.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’, ”The Forty Rules of Love’, and ‘Three Daughters of Eve’. Her latest book is ’10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.’

Her work has been translated into fifty languages, published by Penguin/Random House and represented by Curtis Brown globally. She was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 Elif was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.

Elif Shafak is also a political scientist and an academic. She holds a degree in International Relations, a masters’ degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science and Political Philosophy. She has taught at various universities in Turkey, the UK and the USA, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow.

Elif Shafak is a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED Global speaker, each time receiving a standing ovation.

Her writing has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize; the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. She judged numerous prestigious literary prizes.

Tickets cost just £5 are available from the Blackwell’s Eventbrite website or from Blackwell’s Bookshop, 50 Broad Street, Oxford.

Scientists need your help! As we get more information about the Universe, we risk becoming overwhelmed but – as Oxford astronomer Chris Lintott explains in his new book, you can help. Hear from Oxford scientists who have worked with volunteers to find planets, and to count penguins, and even hunt aliens.

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by astrophysicist and YouTuber, Dr Becky Smethurst on her first book, Space: 10 Things You Should Know.

Synopsis

Written by Oxford astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and composed of ten simple essays, this title guides you swiftly through the galaxies, explaining the mysteries of black holes, dark matter and what existed before the Big Bang, presenting the evidence as to whether we really are alone, illuminating what we still don’t know, and much more besides. If you have big questions about Space, this volume will provide you with the answers in an engaging and succinct way.

Becky Smethurst is a research fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford with a special interest in how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes evolve together. She is also a science communicator through her YouTube channel, Dr. Becky, which has over 45,500 followers.

This event is free, but please do register if you plan on attending. For more information please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a special Hallowe’en event exploring black magic, with Thomas Waters and Lucie McKnight Hardy as they discuss their books ‘Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times’ and ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’.

‘Cursed Britain’

Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.

This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

Thomas Waters is lecturer in history at Imperial College London and a specialist in the modern history of witchcraft and magic.

‘Water Shall Refuse Them’

The heatwave of 1976. Following the accidental drowning of her sister, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn’t bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft – collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her, and has his own secret rites to divulge.

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the debut author of ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’, an atmospheric coming-of-age novel, full of magical suspense.

Tickets cost £5. There will be a bar serving an array of magical potions from 6:45pm – 7pm. Fancy dress is welcomed. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Join prize-winning author Olivia Laing in conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee.

Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her latest book, Crudo, is a real-time novel about the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Sarah Weir OBE, Chief Executive, Design Council, will lecture on ‘Designing the Future: Who is doing it?’ She will consider the question of what design is – a mindset and skillset; critical thinking and creativity combined; much more than aesthetics.

The Lady English Lecture Series marks the College’s continuing commitment to the education and advancement of women and promotes the contributions made by women to the University and to public life more generally.

Join Galician poet Chus Pato and Canadian translator Erín Moure for a reading from Chus Pato’s new book of poems, Un libre favor.

The event marks the completion of their residency with The Queen’s College and is followed by a drinks reception until 7.15pm.

All are welcome; sign up on through Eventbrite to let us know if you plan to come.

The Night Sky Show will take you on an epic journey from our celestial back yard and across the cosmos.

Comedy, astronomy and so much more. A show for anyone with a slight interest or more in the night sky. A night for those who want to laugh, learn and enjoy.

A fun, entertaining and memorable evening which will help you understand and enjoy the heavens above and universe beyond. Helpful for the next time you’re stargazing, or when you just look up and wonder.

We’ll skip the heavy going science and hard to follow explanations. The Universe and everything within will be presented in an entertaining and easily absorbed way.

AN AMAZING SHOW FOR EVERYONE

This won’t be a boring astronomy talk, it will be a spectacular astronomy talk anyone can enjoy!

Learn about the constellations, stars, planets and the deeper cosmos. The sheer scale of the universe and the mythology and stories of the night sky.

Presented by Adrian West – A passionate and experienced astronomer. Better known as VirtualAstro on Twitter and Facebook. He has one of the largest independent astronomy and space accounts on social media. He’s passionate about the night sky and inspiring people to look up by being interesting, down-to-earth and fun!

Adrian has written many astronomy and space related articles for various popular online science magazines. He has also written guides and articles for the BBC, Met office and National Trust to name a few.

If you look up and wonder, The Night Sky Show is for you.

SO LETS EXPLORE!

Biographer and critic Lucasta Miller will give this term’s lecture in memory of Harry M Weinrebe, philanthropist and founder of the Dorset Foundation.

A former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Beaufort visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Lucasta Miller is the author of The Brontë Myth (Jonathan Cape, 2001) and L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Jonathan Cape, 2019), the Celebrated ‘Female Byron’.

The OCLW Weinrebe Lectures are an annual series named in memory of Harry Weinrebe, a philanthropist and the founder of the Dorset Foundation.A

Join us for a reception to celebrate Elleke Boehmer’s new short story collection, with a reading of the story, ‘The Biographer and the Wife’, and a discussion of the biographer as a source of creative inspiration with Sophie Ratcliffe and Katherine Collins.

Blackwell’s is thrilled to be welcoming Jenny Hartley, author of ‘Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction’ to explore all elements of one of our most popular authors. Why not make 2020 the year you pick up a Charles Dickens classic!

Synopsis

Charles Dickens is credited with creating some of the world’s best-known fictional characters, and is widely regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian age. Even before reading the works of Dickens many people have met him already in some form or another. His characters have such vitality that they have leapt from his pages to enjoy flourishing lives of their own: The Artful Dodger, Miss Havisham, Scrooge, Fagin, Mr Micawber, and many many more. His portrait has been in our pockets, on our ten-pound notes; he is a national icon, indeed himself a generator of what Englishness signifies.

In this Very Short Introduction Jenny Hartley explores the key themes running through Dickens’s corpus of works, and considers how they reflect his attitudes towards the harsh realities of nineteenth century society and its institutions, such as the workhouses and prisons. Running alonside this is Dickens’s relish of the carnivalesque; if there is a prison in almost every novel, there is also a theatre. She considers Dickens’s multiple lives and careers: as magazine editor for two thirds of his working life, as travel writer and journalist, and his work on behalf of social causes including ragged schools and fallen women. She also shows how his public readings enthralled the readers he wanted to reach but also helped to kill him. Finally, Hartley considers what we mean when we use the term ‘Dickensian’ today, and how Dickens’s enduring legacy marks him out as as a novelist different in kind from others.

All ‘For Learning For Life’ talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. Talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department, which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come, first seated basis, with standing room available. For all enquiries, please email us on events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Make 2020 the year when you delve into Crime Fiction with this talk from best-selling author, Sophie Hannah, on her new book, Haven’t They Grown as part of our For Learning, For Life series.

Synopsis:

All Beth has to do is drive her son to his Under-14s away match, watch him play, and bring him home.

Just because she knows that her former best friend lives near the football ground, that doesn’t mean she has to drive past her house and try to catch a glimpse of her. Why would Beth do that, and risk dredging up painful memories? She hasn’t seen Flora Braid for twelve years.

But she can’t resist. She parks outside Flora’s house and watches from across the road as Flora and her children, Thomas and Emily, step out of the car. Except…

There’s something terribly wrong.

Flora looks the same, only older – just as Beth would have expected. It’s the children that are the problem. Twelve years ago, Thomas and Emily Braid were five and three years old. Today, they look precisely as they did then. They are still five and three. They are Thomas and Emily without a doubt – Beth hears Flora call them by their names – but they haven’t changed at all.

They are no taller, no older.

Why haven’t they grown?

Sophie Hannah is an internationally bestselling crime fiction writer, translated into 49 languages and published in 51 countries. Her psychological thriller The Carrier won the Specsavers National Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year in 2013. Sophie is the author of the bestselling Poirot continuation mysteries. The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives have been adapted for television as Case Sensitive, starring Olivia Williams and Darren Boyd. Sophie is also a bestselling poet who has been shortlisted for the TS Eliot award. Her poetry is studied at GCSE and A-level. Sophie is an Honorary Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She lives in Cambridge with her family.

All For Learning, For Life talks are free to attend and everyone is welcome, please register in advance. Talks may be taking place in our Philosophy Department, which is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Seating is limited and will be allocated on a first come, first seated basis, with standing room available. For all enquiries, please email us on events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Claire Tomalin was born in 1933 in London to an English mother, the composer Muriel Herbert (linnrecords.com), and a French father. After a somewhat disorganised wartime childhood she studied at Cambridge, married the journalist Nicholas Tomalin, worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then the Sunday Times, while bringing up their children. Nick was killed reporting the Yom Kippur war in 1973. In 1974 she published her first book The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize. Since then she has written Shelley and His World 1980; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life 1987; The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 1991 [NCR, Hawthornden, James Tait Black prizes, and a film with Ralph Fiennes, Felicity Jones, Joanna Scanlan, Tom Hollander]; Mrs Jordan’s Profession 1994; Jane Austen: A Life 1997; Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self 2002 [Whitbread biography and Book of the Year prizes, Pepys Society Prize, Rose Crawshay Prize]. Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man appeared in 2006, after which she made a television film about Hardy with Melvyn Bragg, and published a selection of Hardy’s poems. Her Charles Dickens: A Life was published in 2011. A collection of her reviews, Several Strangers, appeared in 1999, and a memoir, A Life of My Own, in 2017.
Her books are translated into many languages. She has honorary doctorates from Cambridge, UEA, Birmingham, the Open University, Greenwich, Goldsmith, Roehampton, Portsmouth and York universities.
She has served on the Committee of the London Library and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, of the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN.

Discover how art can inflict both harm and harmony in this special live performance of Iris Murdoch’s Art and Eros.

A panel discussion will follow a 45 minute play acted by Oxford Brookes University drama students. With panel members including actress Annette Badland and Murdoch biographer Anne Rowe, we’ll consider what Iris Murdoch’s work says about the meaning of art.

What’s it like to be haunted? Writer Jay Bernard’s augmented reality installation explores this question – unpicking how we can be haunted by our histories and our everyday lives.

Listen to a reading while exploring alternative realities in an AR experience that looks at how the past and present are closely linked.

The installation is based on their debut collection, ‘Surge’, which considered the aftermath of the 1981 New Cross Fire. Jay Bernard is the winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work Poetry and has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize.

Part of The Think Human Festival
Everyone welcome

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann was described by Anthony Burgess as “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” After making a case in support of this claim, I shall tell the story of the book’s creation. Among the topics to be discussed are how and why Ellmann became a biographer; how he chose Joyce as a subject; how he gained the cooperation of the Joyce estate and of Joyce’s family; how he collected Joyce’s papers (a matter of diplomacy, guile, doggedness and luck); how he conducted interviews and chose interviewees; how he placated publishers and thwarted competitors; how he determined the biography’s themes and structure, including the vexed problem of balancing narrative with literary analysis; and how and why he produced a second edition. The aim of the talk will be to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the way literary biographies are made, remind readers how much they can tell us about human behaviour and the creation of works of art, and make clear how gifted a writer and critic Ellmann was.

Lincoln Leads is a series of seminars tackling a different theme every week. All are warmly invited to attend this year’s Shakespeare Seminar on February 27th which will explore the question ‘Can Editing Influence a Play’s Legacy? with Prof. Henry Woudhuysen (Lincoln College), Prof. Lukas Erne (University of Geneva) and Eirian Yem (DPhil in English Literature). The panel will be chaired by Waqas Mirza (DPhil in French and English Literature).

The seminars take place in the Oakeshott Room at Lincoln College on Thursday evenings during Hilary term. Following a free wine reception from 5pm, each seminar will start at 5.45pm, culminating in a lively audience Q&A session that ends at 7pm. We have a fantastic group of panellists scheduled for the series. We therefore hope that you are eager to join them in conversation, and learn more about the diverse research conducted at Lincoln.

Tickets are free, but must be booked in advance. Spaces are limited and going fast, so make sure you sign up by clicking here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lincoln-leads-2020-tickets-87627477143

Do join us at the seminar to find out what Lincoln Leads is all about, and celebrate the diverse research connected with the College.
Bring all your friends, enjoy all the free wine and ask all the questions.

For more information on the seminar series, please visit our pages on social media: Facebook @lincolnleads

Join us as we hear from Prof Martin Bureau (University of Oxford) about his research on Supermassive black holes.

‘Supermassive black holes are now known to lurk at the centre of most
galaxies. They are also believed to play a key role in the evolution
of galaxies, by regulating the supply of the gas necessary to form
stars. Here, I will present key results from the mm-Wave
Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), a high
resolution survey of molecular gas in galaxy nuclei. I will first show
that carbon monoxide (CO) can be used to easily and accurately measure
the mass of these supermassive black holes. I will then discuss
substantial ongoing efforts to do this, and present many new
spectacular measurements from the Atacama Large
Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA), the largest ground-based
telescope project. This effort opens the way to literally hundreds of
measurements across galaxies of all morphological types, both active
and non-active, with a unique method. It thus promises to
revolutionise our understanding of the co-evolution of galaxies and
black holes.’

FREE entry

Drinks and snacks provided. (Non-alcoholic and vegetarian/vegan dietary requirements provided for. For other diets please get in touch in advance)

For more information email emil.ostergaard@stcatz.ox.ac.uk. There is wheelchair access. There is padded seating, and an accessible toilet. There is blue badge parking by request at the event.

Blake Gopnik’s definitive biography digs deep into the radical genius of Andy Warhol. Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol’s surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist’s path from his modest origins in Pittsburgh and first success as an illustrator, to his ground-breaking pivot into Pop Art in the 1960s, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity that became his hallmarks in the ’70s and ’80s. He overcame the vicious homophobia of his youth to become a symbol of gay achievement, while always seeking the pleasures of traditional romance and coupledom. (Warhol explodes the myth of his asexuality.) Despite being burdened with an almost crippling shyness, Warhol sought out all the most notable figures of his times – Susan Sontag, Mick Jagger, the Rothschilds. Filled with new insights into the artist’s work and personality, Warhol asks: Was he a joke or a genius, a radical or a social climber? As Warhol himself would have answered: Yes.

Please note that this event has been cancelled.

Join novelist Sarah Moss and historian Sarah Knott in conversation with critic Merve Emre.

A conversation about life-writing and the Lives of Houses. With Hermione Lee, Roy Foster, Alexandra Harris, and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst.

An exploration of the work of prolific writer Jenny Diski, with a keynote lecture from Blake Morrison.

In this talk Natasha Randall explores the task of biographical research into the figure of the literary translator Constance Garnett. Translators notionally produce non-original text but are there aspects of their work, their semantic tendencies perhaps, that can expose something of their personal nature, or their lived experience? Garnett brought seventy volumes of Russian literature to English readers over the course of her lifetime, often first translations, and yet her existing letters and diaries betray relatively little of her interior life. Can her translations provide additional insight into her life and character? What are the detectable choices in Garnett’s work that can contribute to a portrait of her?

Natasha Randall is a literary translator of the works of Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin, Gogol, and others, for publishers such as Penguin Classics, Canongate’s Canon, and the Modern Library. Her writing and critical work has appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Moscow Times, BookForum, The New York Times, Strad magazine, The Yale Review, Jubilat, and on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor to the New York-based literary magazine A Public Space. Her novel, Love Orange, about modern anxieties and opioid addiction, was published in September by riverrun (Quercus).

Lt. Major Cecilia Diaconeasa was a Cold War secret police informant who in March 1983, several weeks after the birth of her baby daughter, was assigned to extract confessions from a woman suspected of collaborating in a public political protest, and to prevent her from committing ‘unthinkable acts’. Her ‘target,’ my mother, was under arrest in the infectious ward of the district’s children’s hospital with her own new born son, who was struggling for his life. The talk will discuss working with Cold War surveillance family archives and the process of getting inside the Lt.’s mind, in order to understand the narrative of oppression. In the course of locating the appropriate form which could transform the historical documents and the life experiences into literature, I found myself asking deeper questions about what constitutes literary language.

Carmen Bugan, a George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America, a Poetry Society Special Commendation. Her memoir, Burying the Typewriter, called by the Sunday Times ‘a modern classic,’ won the Bread Loaf Nonfiction Prize and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Her poems have been anthologized in the Penguin’s Poems for Life and Joining Music with Reason among others, and her work has been translated into several languages. She wrote a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile and reviews regularly for Harvard Review Online. Bugan was the 2018 Helen DeRoy Professor in Honors at the University of Michigan and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in Manhattan. She appears on current affairs and history programmes on the BBC, NPR, Monocle, and ABC. Bugan has a DPhil in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford University. Her book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2021.

This is the Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing for Michaelmas Term 2020.

Hermione Lee, whose biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber on 1 October, talks about his life and work, and the challenges for a biographer in writing the life of a living subject.

With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven Spielberg, Hermione Lee has built a meticulously researched portrait of one of our greatest playwrights. Drawing on several years of long, exploratory conversations with Stoppard himself, it tracks his Czech origins and childhood in India to every school and home he’s ever lived in, every piece of writing he’s ever done, and every play and film he’s ever worked on. This is the revealing story of a very public and very private man.

Hermione Lee was the President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017, and is the founder and advisory director of OCLW. She held the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature at Oxford from 1998 to 2008, and before that taught at the Universities of Liverpool and York. Her work includes acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2007) and Penelope Fitzgerald (2013, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography). She has also published books on Elizabeth Bowen, Willa Cather and Philip Roth, and she has written about life-writing, in Body Parts: Essays on Life-Writing (2005), Biography: A Very Short Introduction (2009), and, co-edited with Kate Kennedy, in a collection based on an OCLW conference, called Lives of Houses (2020). Her biography of Tom Stoppard is published by Faber in October 2020. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Royal Society of Literature (where she serves on the Council) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she was made a Dame for services to literature.

The video of this Weinrebe Lecture in Life-Writing will be available for 24 hours only.

Come along to the long-awaited Night Sky Show at the fantastic Great Hall in Cholsey. It will certainly be a night to remember!

Facts, fiction, laughter and more in a fantastic place, for one night only. A night of great entertainment as well as an event for everyone!

SHOW DESCRIPTION

The Cholsey Night Sky Show will take you on an epic journey. Certainly a very unique and different journey! From our celestial back yard and across the cosmos.

Comedy, astronomy and so much more. Above all, an evening for anyone with a slight interest in the night sky or more. A night for anyone who indeed wants to laugh, learn, be inspired and enjoy.

The Night Sky Show will be a truly fun, entertaining and memorable evening. Helping you understand and enjoy the heavens above and the universe beyond. Helpful for the next time you’re looking up at the night sky stargazing, or when you just look up and wonder.

For one thing, we’ll skip the heavy going science and hard to follow explanations. The Universe and everything within will be presented in an entertaining and easily absorbed way.

AN AMAZING SHOW FOR EVERYONE

This won’t be a boring astronomy talk. The Night Sky Show is a theatrical performance anyone can enjoy! Learn about constellations, stars, planets and the deeper cosmos. The sheer scale of the universe. The mythology and stories of the night sky.

Presented by Adrian West – A passionate and experienced astronomer. Better known as VirtualAstro on Twitter and Facebook. One of the largest independent astronomy and space accounts on social media. He’s passionate about the night sky and inspiring people to look up. His success is due to being interesting, down-to-earth and fun! The writer of numerous astronomy and space-related articles for various popular online science magazines. He has also written guides and articles for the BBC, Met Office and National Trust to name a few. You can regularly find him pointing out things to people in the night sky.

If you look up and wonder, The Night Sky Show is for you. www.nightskyshow.co.uk

SO LET’S EXPLORE!
Suitable for ages 8+ Fully licenced bar.

In her mid-20s, Heidi Williamson was part of a Scottish community that suffered an inconceivable tragedy, the Dunblane Primary School shooting.

Through poems about landscape and loss, the poems in her third collection, Return by Minor Road (Bloodaxe), explore the lasting impact of being an ‘incoherent bystander’ at such a tragedy.

Through rivers, rain, wildlife and landscape, Williamson revisits where ‘the occasional endures’ and discovers the healing properties of a beloved place:

‘These small movements
towards the bracken
are to be reckoned with.’

—

Heidi Williamson is a poet, writing tutor and mentor, and an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. She studied poetry and prose at the UEA and regularly teaches for arts and literature organisations in the UK.

Her work has appeared in literary journals in the UK, America and Australia and been translated into Polish, German, and Turkish. It has inspired poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at science and literary festivals in the UK and abroad.

Her first collection, Electric Shadow, was supported by a grant from Arts Council England and was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry.

Her second collection was inspired by being a printer’s daughter. The Print Museum received the EAW Book by the Cover’ Award and the 2016 East Anglian Book Award for Poetry.

With a rootless lily held in front of him, a poem from her latest collection, won the 2019 Plough Prize.

Following her Research Forum talk in Trinity 2020, ‘The Elusive Subject: Biographies of Exiles’ Soledad Fox Maura returns to the OCLW programme for the launch of her first novel, Madrid Again (Simon & Schuster), in conversation with Hannie Lawlor. Told with humor, candor, and grit, Madrid Again is a highly original novel, and an homage to the haunting power of history, and how it shapes the identity of two generations of women.

Soledad Fox Maura is the V-Nee Yeh ‘81 Professor at Williams College. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. She has written two biographies that have been published in English, Spanish, and French. The first one is about Constancia de la Mora, aka one of the Spanish “Mitford Sisters” who rebelled against her wealthy and conservative upbringing to become a one-woman anti-Fascist force during the Spanish Civil War; and the second about Jorge Semprún, who fought in the French Resistance, survived Buchenwald, and went on to become a serial autobiographer, auto-fiction writer, and Oscar nominee for two screenplays. At the moment she is preparing editions of memoirs written by two Spanish women in exile, and working on a collection of biographical essays about American collectors, soldiers, writers, artists, and impresarios, and politicians in 20th century Spain.