For the first time ever, you can also get a combined daytime and evening ticket so that you can enjoy an evening of music and poetry at the Sage, after the Symposium for only £25.10 (Students £19.60). Alternatively the Symposium Day Only ticket costs £15, Friend of the Festival £13.50, Student Rate £10.
Gone Westering:
Inspired by Norwegian folklorist Arne Bjørndal’s visit to Shetland in 1949, Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey joins forces with Shetland fiddler and composer, Catriona Macdonald, to explore, through a complex interweaving of voice and music, ideas of tradition, the dynamics of archives, and our connection to the past.
Catriona Macdonald is senior lecturer and Degree Programme Director of the BA in Folk and Traditional Music at Newcastle University. She currently performs with her own band, as well as with international fiddle band String Sisters whose latest album is ‘Between Wind and Water’ (2018).
Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six poetry collections. On Balance (2017) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Her other awards include the T S Eliot Prize and the E M Forster Award. She is Director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts at Newcastle University.
Brecht Then & Now:
Poet David Constantine and translator Tom Kuhn present the life and times of the great German writer Berthold Brecht in an electric performance fusing poems, narration, songs, music and photographs. Focusing on the years 1922-1933, they trace the vagaries of the Weimar Republic and the Rise of National Socialism through the lens of Brecht’s poetry, translated into English for the first time as a complete edition (Norton, 2018).
David Constantine taught German at Oxford for over 30 years. He has published a dozen volumes of poetry, including Madder, Watching for Dolphins, Caspar Hauser, The Pelt of Wasps, Something for the Ghosts, Collected Poems, Nine Fathom Deep and Elder (2014), as well as two novels, Davies (1985) and The Life-Writer (2015), and five collections of short stories.
Tom Kuhn teaches German language and literature at Oxford, where he is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. As well as co-translating The Collected Poems of Berthold Brecht with David Constantine, he is also the series editor of the principal English-language edition of Brecht’s plays and other writings with Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.