The Thomas
Hardy Society

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

United Kingdom

Leading Hardy scholars.
Receptions, Suppers and Tastings.
Guided Walks and Coach Tours.
Drama and Musical performances.

The 2010 International Thomas Hardy Conference will mark the 170th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Hardy. Like its predecessors it will be designed to appeal both to Hardy scholars and to the lay readers who attend in large numbers.

Distinguished scholars both in this country and abroad will give the academic side of the programme. Their subjects will range over many different aspects of Hardy's life and works.

Those taking part include:

Sir 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.

Claire Tomalin
Biographer Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933. After graduating from Newnham College, Cambridge, she worked in publishing for Heinemann, Hutchinson and Cape before switching to journalism, becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Wordsworth Trust, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice-President of English PEN.

Claire Tomalin is the author of highly acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen. Her account of Charles Dickens' relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, was published in 1990 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography), the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize. It was followed by Mrs Jordan's Profession (1994), a biography of the actress Dora Jordan, consort to William IV.

Her play The Winter Wife (1991) is based on her own biography of Katherine Mansfield, and she edited the first edition of a previously undiscovered manuscript by Mary Shelley, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, first published in 1998. A collection of book reviews and journalism, Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades, was published in 1999.

Claire Tomalin lives in London with her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn. Her biography of the seventeenth-century diarist Samuel Pepys (2002) won the the Samuel Pepys Award, and the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year award. Her book Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), was shortlisted for the British Book Awards Biography of the Year. Most recently she has selected and edited two books of poetry: The Poems of Thomas Hardy (2007), and The Poems of John Milton (2008).

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.

Michael Millgate
Michael Millgate was born in England and educated at Cambridge University, before doing a PhD in American literature at Leeds. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1967, where he devoted his time to studying the life and works of Thomas Hardy. He has edited seven volumes of Hardy's letters, and the selected letters of his wives.

The programme of Coach Tours & Walks include:

Day visit to Boscastle, Cornwall, led by Helen Gibson and Phillip Mallet.

A day tour to Stonehenge and other archaeological sites, led by Rebecca Welshman and Brenda Parry.

Circular walk from Stinsford Church, following the Service, with a stop for lunch, led by Sue Clarke.

Afternoon walk around Dorchester, led by Helen Lange.

Local coach tour visiting Frome Hill Barrow, Birthplace, Lower Bockhampton, Stinsford and West Knighton, led by Furse Swann.

'Hardy's Churches' coach tour led by JoAnna Mink.

'Trumpet Major' and 'Melancholy Hussar' walk from Sutton Poyntz, led by Tony Fincham. In conjunction with the South Dorset Ridgeway Festival.

Coach tour to Sherborne, led by Helen Lange.

Coach tour 'Another Group of Noble Houses', led by Helen Gibson.

Visit to 'Knollsea' with walk in hoofsteps of Ethelberta to Corfe Castle, led by Angela Bell.

'Three Wayfarers' walk, led by Tony Fincham.

Afternoon coach tour of West Dorset to include Beaminster, Bridport, Abbotsbury and Lyme Regis, led by Sue Clarke.