Lynette Roberts

31 October 2009, Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea Organised in association with the University of Oxford, CREW (Swansea University), the Dylan Thomas Festival and Carcanet Press.

LYNETTE ROBERTS (1909-1995)

A one-day conference Saturday 31 October, 2009
Dylan Thomas Centre Swansea

2009 is the centenary of the birth of Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), the modernist war poet who produced her most important work in West Wales. 

The conference will open on Friday 30th with a showing of the recent BBC4 film about her, in the company of writer and presenter Owen Sheers, and end on Saturday 31st with a poetry reading by poets from Wales and beyond.

Conference speakers will include Deryn Rees-Jones, Patrick McGuinness, Stella Halkyard, John Goodby, Charles Mundye, Zoe Skoulding and the poets will be Deryn Rees-Jones, Menna Elfyn and Nigel Jenkins. Angharad Rhys, Lynette's daughter, will talk about her mother's life, and there will be an exhibition of photographs, books and papers from the Lynette Roberts family archive.

More information is available from Professor Patrick McGuinness, St Anne's College, University of Oxford, OX26HS (patrick.mcguinness@st-annes.ox.ac.uk).

Registration should be made with the Dylan Thomas Centre on 01792 463980.
Cost for attendance at the conference, including reception, poetry reading, and tea and coffee is £15 full price and £10 concessions.

The Conference Ticket also includes entry to the following Dylan Thomas Festival Events:

Friday 30 October

7.00pm: Lynette Roberts Film

As a precursor to the Lynette Roberts Conference, Owen Sheers will introduce his recent BBC Poetry Season film on much neglected modernist poet and friend of Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts, followed by: 

8.00pm    An evening with Fflur Dafydd and Owen Sheers

Fflur Dafydd is a novelist, singer-songwriter and lecturer in Creative Writing at Swansea University. Fflur won the Literature Medal in the National Eisteddfod in Swansea in 2006 for her novel Atyniad (Y Lolfa, 2006). In June this year she was announced as the first winner of the Oxfam Emerging Writer of the Year Award. Owen Sheers is an award-winning poet and novelist. His debut prose work The Dust Diaries (Faber, 2004) won the Wales Book of the Year Award in 2005 and his first novel Resistance (Faber, 2008) has been translated into nine languages.

Together Fflur and Owen will perform their work in a unique bilingual evening of poetry and song.
In association with Academi.

For more information on the Dylan Thomas Festival (26 October to 9 November) please see www.dylanthomas.com

LYNETTE ROBERTS (1909-1995)

DRAFT PROGRAMME

9.30-10 Registration and Coffee

10.00 – Gareth Evans, University of Wales, Swansea: ‘Always observant and slightly obscure: Lynette Roberts and Ethnographic Practice’

10.20 – Laura Wainwright, Cardiff: ‘Lynette Roberts and Welsh Modernism’

10.40 – Columba Quigley, London: ‘Lynette Roberts: Writing the Life and Writing the Mind’

11.15 - Coffee

12.00 – Lecture – John Goodby: ‘A Glade of Magnesium: Cybernetics and the in/organic in Gods with Stainless Ears’

1 pm Lunch

2 pm – Zoe Skoulding, Poetry Wales and University of Wales, Bangor: ‘Listening and location in the poetry of Lynette Roberts'

2.20 – Stella Halkyard, Manchester: ‘Make do and mend: Art, Craft and Curation in the work of Lynette Roberts’

2.40 – Stephen Procter, Liverpool: ‘Landscape and Narrative in Gods with Stainless Ears’

3.15 – Break

3.30  – Leo Mellor, Cambridge: 'Reading in a glade of magnesium: students' responses to Lynette Roberts'

3.50  – Jeremy Noel-Tod, East Anglia: ‘Lynette Roberts and the Lost Tradition’

4.10 – Charles Mundye, Hull: ‘Finding Keidrych Rhys’
 
4.45 – Break

5.pm – ‘Living with Lynette and Keidrych’ – Angharad Rhys, Lynette and Keidrych’s daughter, in conversation with Patrick McGuinness

5.30 – End

6 pm –  Reception offered by Carcanet Press

7 pm –  Poetry Reading by Menna Elfyn, Nigel Jenkins and Deryn Rees-Jones. Margot Morgan will also read a selection of poems by Lynette Roberts.

There will be an exhibition of books, letters and photographs relating to  Lynette Roberts, Keidrych Rhys and Wales magazine, organised by Jeff Towns of the Dylan Thomas Bookshop, in the Corridor Gallery.