Babcock Lecture on Learning to Listen: Some Thoughts on Life-Writing

Babcock Seminar in GLS - SFU 

Sunday 15 October, 11am PDT / 7pm BST

Online via Zoom

Aida Edemariam in Conversation with Kate Kennedy - "Learning to Listen: Some Thoughts on Life-Writing"

Aida Edemariam's biography The Wife’s Tale, a finalist for a Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada and an Arts Futures Award in the UK, won both a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award and the 2019 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. As a journalist, she has worked at Harper's Magazine in New York and the National Post in Toronto (as deputy review and books editor) and is now a senior feature writer and editor at The Guardian. She has also judged various literary prizes, including the International Booker Prize, and, most recently, the David Cohen Prize for Literature.

Kate Kennedy is Co-Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing and Weinrebe Fellow in Life-Writing at Wolfson College. She has published widely on British composers and writers in the early twentieth century. Dweller in Shadows: A life of Ivor Gurney, her biography of the First World War poet/composer, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021 and has met with much critical acclaim and been shortlisted for a Royal Philharmonic Society 2021 award. She was editor of Literary Britten, a compendium of scholarship on Benjamin Britten’s use of text (Boydell and Brewer, 2018); and was co-editor of both The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice (Manchester University Press, 2013) and The First World War: Literature, Music, Memory (Routledge, 2011)

She is a regular broadcaster and academic consultant to both BBC TV and radio, presenting many Radio 3 documentaries, on subjects ranging from women composers to culture and the First World War. In 2017, she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in Public Engagement with Research. She is currently working on a “biography” of four historic cellos which have been lost or silenced, to be published in 2023.

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