Newell Classical Event 2024
Poet Alice Oswald to give lecture celebrating the classical world
The Newell Classical Event 2024 will present award-winning poet Alice Oswald in ‘Message from a Lost Play’, a lecture based on the fragments of the Psychostasia (‘weighing of souls') of Aeschylus, the Ancient Greek dramatist.
The event, which celebrates the classical world, will take place at 7.15pm on Thursday 16 May at St John's College. All are very welcome.
Alice Oswald is one of Britain’s leading poets and winner of many poetry awards, including the TS Eliot Prize in 2002 for Dart and the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017 for Falling Awake.
She held the prestigious position of Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2019-2023. Alice read Greats (Classics) at Oxford, and ancient Greek literature remains a vital influence on her work, most famously in Memorial (2011, winner of the 2013 Warwick Prize for writing). This collection based on Homer’s Iliad digs deeper to commemorate 200 uncelebrated individual warriors lost in the Trojan War.
The Newell Classics Event was established in 2015, following a generous bequest from a Johnian. The aim is to celebrate all that is exciting, creative and forward-thinking in the world of Classics, and bring it to the attention of a wide public.
This year's Newell Classical Event will take place in the Palmerston Room in the Fisher Building at St John's College. Booking is not required.
