In this essay, written for The Guardian on the occasion of a 2008 T.S. Eliot festival at London’s Donmar Warehouse, Jeanette Winterson offers her thoughts on Eliot’s work and legacy. She talks about The Waste Land at some length and describes her first encounter with … Continue reading ‘Language is what stops the heart exploding’
We’ve been enjoying a recent BBC adaptation of The Waste Land, available for streaming on BBC Sounds for the next few weeks. With a cast of well-known character actors, including Maggie Steed, David Haig, Adrian Edmondson and David Calder, the production reimagines Eliot’s polyphonic verses … Continue reading He Do The Waste Land in Different Voices
Cardiff BookTalk is delighted to invite you to our event on Monday 15 August 2022, where we will be marking 100 years of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Celebrating the poem’s centenary with us are Dr Ruth Alison Clemens of Utrecht Univeristy, Dr Nicoletta Asciuto … Continue reading T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land
Patience Agbabi at Petersfield Write Angle poetry & music + Open Mic, Upstairs at The Square Brewery, performing ‘The Wife of Bafa’ in July 2013.
Sheri Smith introduces us to the character of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and her modern-day counterpart, Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa. Read on to find out more! And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende In parfit joye; and Jhesu Crist us sende Housebondes meeke, yonge, … Continue reading The Wife of Bath and the Wife of Bafa
“Whenever I got stuck I reread the original text and imagined Chaucer winking at me, saying, go girl.”
— Patience Agbabi to The Guardian, 23rd Jan. 2014.
Patience Agbabi, performing the poem that would become the Prologue to her remix of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, at the English and Media Centre’s student conference in October 2012 at the London Institute of Education.
Our next BookTalk event will celebrate World Poetry Day with a discussion of a brilliant re-interpretation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century by one of the UK’s foremost poets: Patience Agbabi’s 2014 poetry collection, Telling Tales.
A review from Siriol McAvoy of our last BookTalk event about David Jones’ In Parenthesis, which took place on 11th October 2016, to whet some appetites on the eve of our next event.
Cardiff BookTalk 
