The Thomas
Hardy Society

c/o Dorset County Museum
High West Street
Dorchester
Dorset
DT1 1XA

The Eighteenth International Thomas Hardy
Conference & Festival

Saturday 26 July - Saturday 2 August 2008

Dorchester
Dorset
UK

Leading Hardy scholars.
Prize winning contestants of our Poetry Competition.
Receptions, Suppers and Tastings.
Guided Walks and Coach Tours.
Drama and Musical performances.

'For all Hardy's reputation as a tragic or, still worse, a gloomy, writer, his work relates directly and vividly to many primary sources of pleasure: landscape, music, song, dance, art, architecture... To gain a stronger sense of this aspect of his writings is to understand them more fully. The great virtue of these Conferences at their best is that they not only bring together, but cross-relate, 'academic' approaches to Hardy and direct sampling of the enjoyments he particularly relished and chose to celebrate.

Eighty years after his death Thomas Hardy contrives to be reassuringly productive. He is among the most widely and continuously enjoyed of all our major authors.'

Michael Irwin
Hon. Chairman

Click for full Conference 2008 Details

Those taking part include:

Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion was born in 1952 and read English at University College, Oxford and subsequently spent two years writing about the poetry of Edward Thomas for an M. Litt. From 1976 to 1980 he taught English at the University of Hull; from 1980 to 1982 he edited the Poetry Review and from 1982 to 1989 he was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Andrew Motion was appointed as Poet Laureate in May 1999.

Brian Patten
Brian Patten was born in 1946 in Liverpool, and grew up in the docklands. He left school at fifteen, becoming a junior reporter on The Bootle Times, with responsibility for writing the popular music column. He made his name in the 1960s as one of the Liverpool Poets, alongside Adrian Henri and Roger McGough.
He has written numerous adult poetry collections, including Vanishing Trick (1976) and Armada (1996). Penguin published his Selected Poems (February 2007), and at the same time Harper Perennial published one of his most important books, The
Collected Love Poems.
Brian Patten is also well known for his best-selling poetry collections for children, most famously Gargling with Jelly: A Collection of Poems (1985) and Juggling with Gerbils (2000). His collection for children, The Blue and Green Ark: An Alphabet
for Planet Earth (1999) won a Cholmondeley Award in 2002. He has also written a novel for children, Mr Moon's Last Case (1975), which won an award from the Mystery Writers of America Guild.
Brian Patten has been honoured with the Freedom of the City of Liverpool. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of both Liverpool University and John Moores University.

Christopher Reid
Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong in 1949, educated in England, and studied at Oxford University from 1968-1971. He then worked as a freelance journalist and as book review editor of Crafts magazine. He won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1978. A year later his first poetry collection, Arcadia (1979) was published, winning the 1980 Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. This has been followed by Pea Soup (1982); Katerina Brac (1985); In The Echoey Tunnel (1991); Expanded Universes (1996); For and After (2002) and Mr Mouth (2005). A selection of his poems was published in the US as Mermaids Explained (2001). He is often cited as co-founder with Craig Raine of the 'Martian School' of poetry, which employs exotic and humorous metaphors to defamiliarize everyday experiences and objects. He has also written two books of poetry for children: All Sorts (1999) and Alphabicycle Order (2001).
He is the editor of two Faber and Faber collections: Sounds Good: 101 Poems to be Heard (1998) and Not to Speak of the Dog: 101 Short Stories in Verse (2000).
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Penny Boumelha
Penny Boumelha holds a Master of Arts and a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Oxford. She has lectured at the University of Western Australia and has participated in a number of academic development and review boards in New Zealand and Australia. In 1997 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities.
Penny Boumelha is currently Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide.

The State of Victoria University, Wellington has appointed Professor Penny Boumelha as the new Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), a position formerly held by Professor David Macky until his retirement in January 2009.

The Conference Secretary
The Thomas Hardy Society c/o Dorset County Museum High West Street Dorchester Dorset DT1 1XA
e-mail: info@hardysociety.org
Telephone: +44 (0)1305 251501

Office hours are 1400hrs - 1600hrs Monday - Thursday.
Answerphone at other times.