The School of Humanities was delighted to present the 12th annual F. T. Prince Memorial Lecture, which took place on Tuesday 22 October 2024 at University of Southampton’s Avenue Campus. We were delighted to welcome Anthony Joseph to speak at this event, presenting his lecture: "Frequencies of Magic".
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“The Frequencies of Magic”
In this lecture Anthony Joseph tracked the influence of 100 years of surrealism on his own development as a poet, novelist and musician. Starting with the Caribbean and moving towards the UK, where he moved to the late 1980s, Joseph describes how aspects of surrealism and surrealist practice are embedded within the Trinidad carnival, calypso arts and jazz, and how his own writing found allegiances with black surrealist writers such as Ted Joans, Sun Ra and Bob Kauffman while crafting a distinctly Caribbean surrealism. Joseph shares work from his newly published Precious and Impossible: Selected Poems (Bloomsbury, 2024)
About the speaker
Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is a poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection Sonnets for Albert won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2022 and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of five poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. His most recent fiction publication is the novel The Frequency of Magic. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London. Precious and Impossible: Selected Poems, which collects 30 years of his work is out now from Bloomsbury Poetry.
About the F. T. Prince Lecture
This annual lecture series takes place in honour of the poet and scholar F. T. Prince, who was one of Southampton’s first English professors. Invited speakers explore new directions in literary studies, drawing on the English department’s wide range of intellectual interests.
This event is co-organised with the Winchester Poetry Festival.
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Avenue Campus, Highfield Road, Southampton SO17 1BF