2 June 2011

Award-winning poet to launch English event

Queen's Gold Medal-winning poet Don Paterson will launch the ninth annual English Postgraduate Conference at the University of Dundee next week.

Dundee-born Mr Paterson will give a poetry reading at the launch event at 6 pm on Wednesday June 8th in the D'Arcy Thompson lecture theatre in the University Tower Building on Perth Road. The event is free and open to the public.

The conference takes place the following day in the University's Dalhousie Building and is expected to attract academics from across the United Kingdom.

Don Paterson's poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently, his collection 'Rain' won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.

He teaches poetry at the University of St Andrews, and since 1996 has been poetry editor at Picador MacMillan.

'We are delighted that Don Paterson is able to launch our event,' said Keir Elder, Postgraduate Representative for the English programme in the School of Humanities at Dundee. 'Don is one of the UK's most respected poets and writers and is of course from Dundee, and I am certain his reading will be a tremendous start to the conference.'

This year's conference is titled 'High and Low: cultural levels in word and image'. It will address configurations of high and low in literature and visual media and is particularly looking at the perceived distinction between highbrow art and lowbrow entertainment, and the ways in which middlebrow texts, and other amalgamations of these two categories, are able to negotiate the apparent gulf between them.

Of particular relevance are texts that have been subject to critical re-evaluations over time, works that mix the sacred and the profance, and artistically sophisticated products of trash culture.

For media enquiries contact:
Roddy Isles
Head, Press Office
University of Dundee
Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4HN
TEL: 01382 384910
E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk
MOBILE: 07800 581902