Alice Oswald | Rhapsody: A Manifesto
Sun 22 Nov 2026 | 8:00pm - 9:00pm
Alice Oswald is one of our greatest living poets – winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize and Costa Poetry Award – and we’re thrilled to welcome her to Cambridge with her daring, genre-defying first work of non-fiction. Rhapsody: A Manifesto begins as an attempt to ‘interview’ Homer and becomes a miraculous exploration of poetry, and a resounding manifesto for the oral tradition. Alice invites us to recognise poetry not as a solitary, written art, but as a communal, essential human inheritance.
In conversation with Bonnie Lander Johnson.
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
Tickets available soon.
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Author Biography
Alice Oswald lives in Devon and has published several poetry collections, including Dart – a long poem about a river – and Memorial, a version of Homer’s Iliad. She has been awarded the T.S Eliot Prize, Forward Poetry Prize, Griffin Poetry Prize and Costa Poetry Award. She was Oxford Professor of Poetry between 2019 and 2024.
Chair Biography
Bonnie Lander Johnson is Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University, where she teaches the literature and history of the early modern period and represents the University on the BBC/Cambridge National Short Story award. Her academic books include Vanishing Landscapes (Hodder & Stoughton), Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge University Press), The Cambridge Handbook to Literature and Plants, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press) and Blood Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press). Bonnie is also a fiction and non-fiction writer. Her work has appeared in Hinterland, The Belfast Review, Howl and Dappled Things, and her fiction has been shortlisted for The Royal Society of Literature’s V. S. Pritchett Prize and The Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize.
