agbabi event 1

Great Writers Inspire at Home: Patience Agbabi reading and conversation

In this podcast the dynamic poet Patience Agbabi is in conversation about her Ted Hughes short-listed collection Telling Tales (2015), a rebellious reworking of Chaucer, and her contribution to the 2016 Refugee Tales project.

After reading from both works Agbabi discusses with Professor Elleke Boehmer, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and medievalist Professor Marion Turner, the key themes that animate her work: her efforts to give voice to the marginalised, the influence of Chaucer upon her writing and practice, and her interests in grime music as well as poetic form, not least the sonnet.

The recording was made on 5 December 2019 at a Writers Make Worlds event in the English Faculty, University of Oxford.

Read an account of the event: ‘No Beautiful Poems about Violence’.