Date: Wednesday 6th February 2019

Time: 7pm – 8.30pm

Location: The Director’s Suite, Principal Hotel, Manchester, M60 7HA

Tickets: £7/5 – available at https://buyonline.mmu.ac.uk/product-catalogue/arts-and-humanities/events/the-peoples-poetry-lectures-michael-symmons-roberts-on-w-h-auden

Carol Ann Duffy and the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University present The People’s Poetry Lectures: today’s leading writers talking about their favourite poets.

The second in our new series features Michael Symmons Roberts on W. H. Auden.

Michael Symmons Roberts has published seven collections of poetry, including his latest Drysalter and Mancunia, and has won the Forward Prize, Costa Poetry Prize and Whitbread Poetry Award, and been shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. His continuing collaboration with composer James MacMillan has led to two BBC Proms choral commissions, song cycles, and work for the Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera, Boston Lyric Opera and Welsh National Opera. Their Royal Opera House/Scottish Opera commission Clemency was nominated for an Olivier Award. Michael's broadcast work includes the BBC4 verse film Men Who Sleep in Cars, and, for Radio 4, Symmetry, which won the Sandford St Martin Prize, and Last Words, commissioned to mark the first anniversary of 9/11. He has published two novels, is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) was educated at Oxford University and went to live in Berlin before returning to England to become a teacher. His early poetry made his reputation as a witty and technically accomplished writer. He collaborated with Christopher Isherwood, who he had met at school, on a number of plays; in 1939, Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States. In New York, Auden met poet Chester Kallman who would be his companion for the rest of his life. Auden taught at a number of American universities and became a US citizen in 1946. He he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection The Age of Anxiety and collaborated with Kallman on the libretto for Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress. He moved to Oxford in 1972 as his health began to decline and died the following year.

Join Michael and Carol Ann in the relaxed setting of Manchester’s iconic Principal Hotel for an informal evening celebrating poetry.

The writers and researchers at Manchester Met, based in the Manchester Writing School, are always exploring two distinct paths within their work; how creative writing might serve as a mode of enquiry into the world and how such research might be disseminated outside of the academy in order for it to have the greatest impact. Our Writers at Manchester Met series allows us to interrogate the very best contemporary writing and continue to explore new ways in which it might reach wider audiences.