Thursday, February 18, 2010

Patience Agbabi and Bernardine Evaristo read from and talk about their work

An AHRC 'Beyond the Linear Narrative' Event: Senior Common Room, Goldsmiths, University of London, Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:30:00 GMT

The Pinter Centre, as part of the 3 year AHRC funded project 'Beyond the Linear Narrative' is delighted to present the third event in our research strand 'Disrupting the Narrative:Gender, sexuality and fractured form in diasporic writing and performance.'

Two poets, Bernardine Evaristo and Patience Agbabi, will read from and talk about their work, followed by discussion and drinks.



About the poets:


Patience Agbabi is a poet and performer born in London in 1965 to Nigerian parents and spent her teenage years living in North Wales. She was educated at Oxford University and has appeared at numerous diverse venues in the UK and abroad.


R.A.W., her groundbreaking debut collection of poetry, was published in 1995, and won the 1997 Excelle Literary Award. Her poetry has been
published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry and IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black
Writing in Britain. Transformatrix, a commentary on late twentieth-century Britain and a celebration of poetic form, was published in 2000. It
received excellent reviews in publications including the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday and Poetry Review.

Her work has also appeared on television and radio. In 1998 her work was featured on Channel 4's Litpop series and she was commissioned by the BBC
to write a poem for the Blue Peter National Children's Poetry Competition in 1999.

In 2002, she obtained an MA in Creative Writing, the Arts and Education at the University of Sussex in Brighton. She has been Lecturer in Creative
Writing at several universities: the University of Greenwich (2002-2003); the University of Wales, Cardiff (2002-2004); and the University of Kent at
Canterbury (2004-2005).


Patience Agbabi lives in Gravesend, Kent. In 2004 she was named as one of the Poetry Society's 'Next Generation' poets. Her most recent collection
is Bloodshot Monochrome (2008).


Bernardine Evaristo is a British writer. She was born in Woolwich, South East London to an English mother and Nigerian father.

She is the author of the books: Hello Mum (Penguin 2010), Lara (Bloodaxe 2009), Blonde Roots (Penguin 2008), Soul Tourists (Penguin
2005), The Emperor’s Babe (Penguin 2001) and the first version of Lara (ARP 1997).


Bernardine’s novella HELLO MUM will be published by Penguin, March 4th, 2010. This book looks at teenage knife crime in the UK, told through the
voice of a 14 year old boy.

LARA was published by Bloodaxe Books on the 29th October 2009. Based on her family history, it spans 150 years, seven generations and five
countries of origin: England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil. Originally published in 1997, this edition has been revised and expanded
by a third.

Her first fully-prose novel BLONDE ROOTS was published by Penguin UK in August 2008. (USA 2009) It is a slavery story with a difference: Africans
enslave Europeans over a four hundred year period. The protagonist is a white woman from Europa who lives out her adult life as a slave in the
New World. Satirical, tragic, imaginative,it offers a fresh perspective on slavery. The US paperback version was published January 5th, 2010.
Posted by Pinter Centre for Research at 7:12 AM

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About the Project

'Beyond the Linear Narrative...' is a 3 year AHRC funded research project being carried out by the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Taking Pinter’s work as a starting point for, or symbol of, the fracturing of narrative across many art-forms in twentieth and twenty-first century work, this research project asks a series of questions about the links between inter-cultural and political change and the emergence, or re-emergence, of non-linear and fractured narrative.

Focussing on literature and performance, particularly in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, it will ask why non-linear narrative has been such a feature of this period’s artistic production. If these fractured and experimental forms are a response to the breakdown of the west’s grand narratives of progress, what forms of resistance or revision do they provide?

In what ways can they be seen to emerge from the increasing interaction of different cultures in the colonial, post-colonial and post-Cold War world? How do such fractured narratives work in postcolonial and diasporic writing and performance? How can these fractured forms explore our culturally diverse society’s competing and conflicting narratives?

The project addresses the ways changing understandings of the self have contributed to the disruption of linear narrative, and in particular, how fractured narratives enable the move away from the Cartesian mind/body duality to an understanding of the embodied self, making the writing of the body such an important element in contemporary performance, fiction and life-writing.

About the Pinter Centre

The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing is an interdisciplinary research centre at Goldsmiths University involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, with links with Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios.

In line with Harold Pinter’s keen awareness of the centrality of political issues, the Centre is particularly committed to looking at postcolonial and diasporic literature and performance, and the ways in which contemporary creativity is forging new forms that respond to the cultural diversity of the world in which we live. It also has a strong interest in questions of gender, and writing and performing the body.

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