Authors Electric

Beginning with Malala, an Inspiration to Many Recently, I came across a newspaper article about Malala Yousafzaia which started off a train of thought and which led me to write it all down for this month's blog post.  I first encountered Malala when I was teaching a Workers' Educational Association (WEA) course on The Poetry of War in 2008. I was using a book 1914 Poetry Remembers created and edited by Carol Anne Duffy who at the time was Poet Laureate. Her idea was that a selection of known poems from WW1 such as Ivor Gurney with "First Time In" would be matched appropriately with newly created works by modern poets.    Duffy had asked fellow poets to create their own poem in response to a poem from WW1. "Avalon", for instance, was the poem that Simon Armitage created in response to Ivor Gurney's poem. I was teaching another matched poem from the book by Imtiaz Dharker, a Pakistani poet who had been brought up in Glasgow. It was called “A century late...

Visions of Johanna - The Portrait of an Artist I began writing this blog the day after the Eurovision Song Contest had been shown on the BBC to great acclaim. It was a contest that had been held in my favourite city, Liverpool, and you can see above a picture of Bob Dylan singing Visions of Johanna in the same city in1966. This was a key work from his album Blonde on Blonde and with any luck you will be able to get the song too, although you don’t have to listen to it all. A couple of verses will give you the flavour. Anyway, it is a longstanding favourite of mine, and on the day of the Eurovision Song Contest I somehow came across this live recording of it from the 1966 Dylan concert at the Odeon Theatre in the city. (On the same day Everton happened to be playing Sheffield Wednesday in the FA cup, which they won.) I still have the programme that I bought on the day of the Dylan concert because, as we time travellers have a habit of saying, "I was there."   The Programme: ...