In this concluding session, Professor Owen Sheers will read from three of his recent works, the verse-drama Pink Mist and the BBC film-poems The Green Hollow and To Provide All People. His reading will be interspersed with conversation about the creative processes involved in creating these works, all three of which engage with ideas of hybridity, lyricism and voice to try and move beyond a partial ‘knowing’ of the truth towards a fuller ‘feeling’ of it. Blending documentary and poetic devices, Owen uses the voices of characters informed by multiple interviews to create communal works that address such subjects as the aftermath of conflict, the Aberfan disaster, and the NHS. The nature of such subjects is that the truth of individual experience at their core is often anonymised in more general public narratives. Through shaping his writing around composite characters, many voices and alternating perspectives Owen is able to write in counterflow to this anonymisation, engaging rhythm, rhyme and imagery to create a strangely intimate lyrical distance through which the gap between a reader and the experiences they are reading is, paradoxically, narrowed to great emotional effect.
‘A tremendous book. It feels huge, engulfing, devastating.’ – The Observer on Pink Mist
‘Epic, heart-stopping. A psalm to humanity, to life and death, survival and tragedy, care and peril.’ – The Guardian on To Provide All People
‘A masterpiece.’ – The Arts Desk on The Green Hollow