The Brontë Society is delighted to welcome award-winning poet Jackie Kay, MBE, as our new writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Jackie will regularly be engaging with visitors and students as the Museum’s writer-in-residence over the next few months - and has already been talking to sixth formers about writing during her first two weeks in residence. Now she is busy at work on a series of new pieces exploring the lives and works of the Brontë sisters. A series of public events, including poetry workshops and readings, will showcase her work, culminating in an exhibition at the Museum in March 2014 as part of the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing. Jackie will be opening the Festival and reading from her work.
‘Having grown up with the Brontës, on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette, Emily’s poetry, and having returned to them again and again all my reading life, it’s a huge privilege to be at the Parsonage, to put the pieces of the Brontë jigsaw together – and to be freshly inspired by this inspirational family,’ she told us. ‘The Parsonage Museum is astonishing: the care that has been taken to bring the past to the present. I’m hoping to write a series of linked poems, and am delighted to have been chosen as writer-in-residence.’
Edinburgh-born Jackie Kay came to prominence in 1992 as winner of The Scottish First Book Award for her volume of poetry The Adoption Papers. Her third volume of poetry, Trumpet, won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1998, and her memoir Red Dust Road – about her search for her natural parents, in Scotland and Nigeria – drew wide critical acclaim for the warmth of her storytelling and the beauty of the poetry with which she told it. Now living in Manchester, Jackie was awarded the MBE in June 2006, and teaches creative writing at Newcastle University.
‘I so enjoyed meeting Jackie and hearing about the themes she will be exploring,’ commented Brontë Society Executive Director Ann Sumner. 'It was wonderful she was so inspired by her visit to Haworth during that period of beautiful warm weather.'
'I am already looking forward to reading Jackie's Brontë-inspired work,' added Brontë Society Chair Sally McDonald. 'All the Brontë family wrote poetry and found inspiration here at the Parsonage.
This is a great program at the Parsonage because it gets children, and really everyone, thinking in terms of writing poetry now
BeantwoordenVerwijderenIt's about today, but such activities links one more strongly to the past and the earlier thinking and writing of poetry.
One is putting themselves in the same space ,so to speak, even more
Best of luck to Jackie Kay