Nostalgia: Architectures of Longing

Saturday 11 May at 4.30pm, Northern Stage, Newcastle Poetry Festival. Tickets are FREE to RSL Members/Fellows. Tickets for the Newcastle Poetry Festival can be purchased here.

This year’s RSL Lecture at the Newcastle Poetry Festival will be delivered by Dr. Anthony Joseph.

How does nostalgia become poetry? What is its texture, its central emotion? For a writer born in the Caribbean, Anthony Joseph’s acts of remembering are also acts of retention. 

In this lecture, Joseph considers how memory becomes nostalgia in exile, integral to an understanding of selfhood, and shaping the poetic impulse. He reflects on the uses and varieties of nostalgia in his own work, exploring the ways in which memory and place are negotiated through the lens of longing. 

Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is an award winning Trinidad-born 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 four previous 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. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His most recent fiction is the experimental novel The Frequency of Magic. 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.