Sean O’Brien, Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature, on ‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’ or ‘The Faster We Go the Rounder We Get’

Other lectures in this series:

Tuesday 28 February – In Conversation with Patrick McGuinness

The lectures take place at 5.30 in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. The first lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome, no need to book.

Sean O’Brien is a poet, novelist, playwright, critic, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University in the UK and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His first six poetry collections gained awards, most recently The Drowned Book (2007), which won both the Forward and T S Eliot Prizes and was republished in 2015 as a Picador Classic.

His version of Dante’s Inferno was published in 2006, and the bilingual poetry anthology, The Third Shore, published simultaneously in the UK and China in 2013, includes translations he produced during ground breaking poet-to-poet workshops in China that year. In 2015, his versions of the poems of Cape Verde Portuguese poet Corsino Fortes were published in the USA.

O’Brien’s own Collected Poems was published in 2012. His eighth and most recent poetry collection, The Beautiful Librarians (2015), shared the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

In 2016 his publications have included his second novel, Once Again Assembled Here, a chapbook of poetry and photographs, Hammersmith, and a graphic novel collaboration, The Railwayman. A second collection of short stories, Quartier Perdu, will be published in 2017.

He is currently working on a new collection of poetry and a book-length poem.