The Bristol Poetry Institute, in coordination with the Centre for Black Humanities at the University of Bristol, is delighted to announce that the 2024-2025 Annual Reading will be delivered by Sir Ben Okri. The event will consist of a one hour reading followed by a half -hour book signing. The event is free but booking is essential.
1 November
6pm
Great Hall, Wills Memorial Building
Ben Okri is the Nigerian-born poet, cultural activist, and author of thirteen novels, including the Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road, the first in a trilogy, and Astonishing the Gods, which was selected as one of the BBC’s ‘100 novels that shaped our world’, as well as collections of poetry, short stories, plays and essays. His work has been translated into more than 27 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes. His poem following the Grenfell Tower tragedy was widely viewed on television and on social media. He was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was awarded an OBE in 2001 and a Knighthood in 2023.
This event is brought to you with support from the Department of English and the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. For access requirements and queries, contact: poetry-institute@bristol.ac.uk.
Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding and celebrated contemporary writers, with over seventy collections of his poetry published throughout the world. He has been the recipient of major awards all over the Spanish-speaking region, including the Loewe Foundation Prize in 2015. His selected poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Serbian, Swedish, and Vietnamese. His work has developed an enthusiastic readership in the US and the UK, where he has published eight book-length translations, including thaw/deshielos (Arc, 2013), from a red barn (co im press, 2020) and rebel matter. poems 2002-20212 (Shearsman, 2022).