“Why is it, asks Anna Beer, that male composers have consistently eclipsed their female counterparts? The solution, she admits, is more complicated than simply rewriting music history “on the principle of add women and stir”. In probing deeper, she has given us a compelling account of eight women composers’ lives and the many and various difficulties they encountered.”
MSt tutor Alice Jolly’s Dead Babies and Seaside Towns has been shortlisted for the Pen / Ackerley Prize 2016
MSt tutor Roopa Farooki’s podcast for the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship, “4 minutes on life changing literature”, is now online.
Listen to it here: “When I finally fell asleep it was to the thundering of hooves”.
MSt alumnus Sam Guglani has a column, “The Notes”, in The Lancet (subscription required)
“Seamus Heaney distinguishes between craft and technique in poetry, and so speaks to us in medicine. He suggests that craft is just a “skill of making…deployed without reference to the feelings or the self”. But technique is much greater: it is a definition of the poet’s “stance towards life”. In medicine, in the throes of all our encounters, what is our stance towards life, and indeed towards death? In this new Lancet column, The Notes, the hope is to wonder about this, to look obliquely again at events that hold meaning for us and for the persons we meet as patients, who are of course all of us”
MSt alumna Jana Casale’s novel, The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, is to be published by Knopf in spring 2018.
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis has won the Warden’s Award for Public Engagement in Doctoral Research for her work “sharing the findings of research at Goldsmiths with the broadest possible audience and involving a wide range of partners and stakeholders in our research as collaborators and participants”
MSt tutor Helen Marshall’s debut novel, Everything that is born, “the story of a girl who, after her younger sister drowns in a terrible storm, is determined to steal the body so she can discover for herself what dying means in a time of extraordinary transformation” is to be published by Random House Canada.
MSt tutor Anna Beer will be speaking on Right Place, Right Time? Women Composers and Their Creative Communities
The lecture, a Fulbright Frontiers Lecture, will take place in Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA.
Join Anna and attendees at 5 pm for tea and coffee. The bar will be open after the lecture concludes at 6:30 pm.
Anna’s book, Sounds and Sweet Airs, has been described by The Guardian as ” a timely bulwark against forgetting, and proffers a number of reasons for the fading of female artists’ reputations … This book helps show why a narrative that insists that the good stuff will naturally and always rise to the surface is simplistic. It is important for us all, composers, musicians, audiences, men, women, society at large, that we seek out the best and most exciting creative voices, from wherever they may come”.
(read the full review)
MSt alumnus Nabin Chettri’s collection, ‘Bini – Poems of a Forgotten Country’ has been honoured with a Discovery Award 2015 by the Red Mountain Press.
MSt alumna Daisy Johnson’s collection Fen will be launched on 3rd June 2016, at Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford. The event begins at 7 pm
“Daisy Johnson’s Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what? English folklore and a contemporary eye, sexual honesty and combustible invention – in Fen, these elements have come together to create a singular, startling piece of modern fiction.”
Read more about the collection (from Foyle’s bookshop website)
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