Followed by a Drinks Reception
All welcome! No tickets required.
How might the use of particular kinds of language change who we are? Who do we be-come when we read and write poetry? What happens on the page—and off it—when words join and meet in surprising and sometimes troubling ways? Can literature be re-lied upon to tell a truth, or will it be always found wanting?
These questions and more will be the basis for a discussion at Merton this term when Peter McDonald (St Hugh’s) introduces iconic South African writer Antjie Krog to an Ox-ford audience.
An author of groundbreaking works of poetry that fuse the individual with the commu-nal, the aesthetic with the political, Antjie Krog will be reading from her highly ac-claimed collections including Lady Anne, Down to my Last Skin, and others, as well as discussing the part language itself has to do with the way we shape individual and col-lective consciousness.
She will be joined by Merton Visiting Research Fellow, Kirsty Gunn, in an evening that promises to open wide our ideas about the value of literature in a post-truth age.
Antjie Krog’s most recent awards include The Stockholm Award from the Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture as well as the Open Society Prize from the Central European University, with Jür-gen Habermas and Vaclav Havel.
Peter McDonald’s Artefacts of Writing was published by OUP in 2017. J. M. Coetzee called The Lit-erature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009) ‘indispensable reading’.
Kirsty Gunn is published by Faber and Faber and the author of short stories, novels and essays. She is the current visiting Creative Research Fellow at Merton.