F T Prince Memorial Lecture 2026: Does the Poem Think (Denise Riley)

About this event

The School of Humanities is pleased to invite you to the 14th annual F. T. Prince Memorial Lecture, which will take place on Tuesday 27 October 2026 at 18:00 on the University of Southampton’s Avenue Campus, Lecture Theatre B.

For this year’s FT Prince Memorial Lecture, the Department of English at the University of Southampton is delighted to welcome Denise Riley.

Denise Riley is one of the most important poets at work in the English language.

“On skulls, poems, bones, and spirits.

The poets invoked will included Byron, Wordsworth, and a number of twentieth century and contemporary authors.”

She will be in conversation with Toby Litt, Associate Professor in Creative Writing.

About the speaker

Denise Riley was born in 1948 and lives in London. She previously taught at the University of East Anglia. Her prose books include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983), ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (1988), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000), The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle; 2004), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005), Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012; revised edition 2019) and A Chorus of Ears: On the ‘Voice of the Poem’, 2026. Her poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), Penguin Modern Poets series 2, vol 10 (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair; 1996), Selected Poems (2000, revised 2019), Say Something Back (2016), Penguin Modern Poets series 3, vol 6 (with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine; 2017), Lurex (2022)

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.

Event Information

Guests can join this event in person at Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, or online. Please select your ticket choice when booking.

We encourage guests who wish to join in person to register at your earliest opportunity as spaces are strictly limited.

If you have any questions about this event please contact fahevent@soton.ac.uk.

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