#DiversityInLit Conference 2019 Conference Programme Wednesday 20th November 2019 Agenda for the day 09:30 – 10:00am Welcome/arrivals 10:00 – 10:10 Solomon O.B Keynote from Ndidi Okezie, VP of Secondary Portfolio, UK 10:10 - 10:40am Schools Speaker 1: Raymond Antrobus, poet and winner of the Rathbone Folio Prize 2019, Ted Hughes award 2019, PBS 10:40 – 11:20am Winter Choice, Sunday Times & The Guardian Poetry Book of The Year 2018 and a Griffin Prize shortlist. Speaker 2: Jamila Gavin, author of many short story collections, teenage novels and books for children aged six to 16 years, 11:20 – 12:00pm including Coram Boy (2000), The Blood Stone (2003) and Tales from India – Stories of Creation and the Cosmos (2011). 12:00 – 12:45pm Lunch Matt Sowerby – Spoken word poet, activist and National Youth 12:45-12:55pm Slam Champion. Speaker 3: Tanika Gupta has written over 20 stage plays that have been produced in major theatres across the UK. She 12:55– 1:30pm has written 30 radio plays for the BBC and several original television dramas, and has taught drama and led playwriting workshops in the UK and across the globe. Panel discussion and Live Q&A chaired by Dr Deirdre 1:40 – 2:30pm Osbourne, Reader in English Literature and Drama at Goldsmiths University, London. 2:40- 2:50pm Solomon O.B 2:50 – 3:00pm Conference close 2 #DiversityInLitConf19 Welcome! We are delighted to welcome you to our first #DiversityInLitConf19 at Friends House Euston, London. “Children need and deserve to see themselves in books, and to have access to a rich and diverse range of voices. If they do, it can be life-changing.” Jill Coleman, Director of Children’s Books at BookTrust. Today we want to celebrate the new diverse voices that we have added in 2019 to our Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) English Literature text list. We’ll be hearing from some of our new authors, playwrights and poets: Raymond Antrobus, Jamila Gavin and Tanika Gupta, about their personal experiences of writing and their take on the issue surrounding a lack of diversity in the literature that is available for students to access in the UK. We will also be continuing the debate around this issue and putting your questions to our live panel this afternoon. We’ve provided space to write any questions you may think of at the back of this programme which you can tear off. We’ll be collecting these at lunch. Today’s event will be live-streamed on our Pearson Qualification Service YouTube channel and available for you to watch and share with your schools from tomorrow. We would love you to share any pictures and thoughts about the day on social media. Please use #DiversityInLitConf19 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to join in the conversation. Enjoy! #DiversityInLitConf19 3 Our speakers Solomon O.B Forward looking whilst rooted in tradition, Solomon O.B is a Poet, Rapper and Musician who combines artforms to create vivid storytelling experiences. An exciting emerging artist, Solomon constantly looks to push his own boundaries along the musicality and limitations of the human voice as an instrument. Awarded 2017 Spoken Word artist of the year by Black British Entertainment and 2016 Hammer and Tongue National Poetry Champion, Solomon is also a Ambassador for TACT (The Children Adolescent Trust) The Uk’s largest Fostering &Adoption Charity . He has made several appearances on BBC One, performing before the FA Cup final and World Athletics Championships as well as appearances on BBC Radio 1Xtra and BBC 5Live. Matt Sowerby Matt Sowerby is an 18 year old protest poet and SLAMbassador from Cumbria. He is the writer of ‘Kidz Theez Dayz’, a spoken word/theatre piece which explores the place of Generation Z in the current political landscape, which premiered recently at Greenbelt Festival. In 2018 End Hunger UK offered him the opportunity to perform his poem ‘Breadlines’ in Parliament, which was a winner in the Young Poets Network challenge. 4 #DiversityInLitConf19 Raymond Antrobus Raymond Antrobus was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father, he is the author of ‘Shapes & Disfigurements’, ‘To Sweeten Bitter’ and ‘The Perseverance’. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include the Ted Hughes award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times & The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for the Griffin Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded ‘The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize’, (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem ‘Sound Machine’. Also in 2019, his poem ‘Jamaican British’ was added to the Pearson Edexcel GCSE syllabus. He is the recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, Complete Works 3 and Jerwood Compton. He is also one of the world’s first recipients of an MA in Spoken Word education from Goldsmiths University. Raymond is a founding member of ‘Chill Pill’ and ‘Keats House Poets Forum’ and is an Ambassador for ‘The Poetry School’. His poems have been published in POETRY, Poetry Review, News Statesman, The Deaf Poets Society, as well as in anthologies from Bloodaxe, Peepal Tree Press and Nine Arches. Raymond has read and performed his poetry at festivals (Glastonbury, Latitude, BOCAS etc) to universities (Oxford, Goldsmiths, Warick etc). He has won numerous slams (Farrago International Slam Champion 2010, The Canterbury Slam 2013 and was joint winner at the Open Calabash Slam in 2016). His poetry has appeared on BBC 2, BBC Radio 4, The Big Issue, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Guardian and at TedxEastEnd. www.raymondantrobus.com #DiversityInLitConf19 5 Our speakers Jamila Gavin Jamila Gavin was born in Mussoorie, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. With an Indian father and an English mother, she inherited two rich cultures, which ran side by side throughout her life and always made her feel she belonged to both countries. The family finally settled in England where Jamila completed her schooling, was a music student, worked for the BBC and became a mother of two children. It was then that she began writing children’s books and felt a need to reflect the multi-cultural world in which she and her children now lived. Since her first book, The Magic Orange Tree, was published in 1979, she has been writing steadily, producing collections of short stories, myths and legends, the last being Blackberry Blue: six original fairy tales. She has written several teenage novels, including The Surya Trilogy of which the first, The Wheel of Surya, was runner-up for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Award in 1992 and is currently under option for a film adaptation, as is a later novel, The Robber Baron’s Daughter. Her book, Coram Boy was published to critical acclaim in 2000 and won the Children’s Whitbread Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Coram Boy went on to be adapted by Helen Edmundson for the National Theatre, where it had two successful runs, and is now much performed all over the world. Coram Boy has been added to the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9–1) English Literature syllabus. Jamila has written for television, radio and the stage. Her first original radio play, The God at The Gate was broadcast on Radio 4. She adapted her children’s books, Monkey in the Stars and Just So, for the Polka Theatre, as well as dramatising her book Grandpa Chatterji for Channel 4 Schools in an adaptation that starred Roshan Seth and Saeed Jaffrey. www.jamilagavin.co.uk/ 6 #DiversityInLitConf19 Tanika Gupta Over the past 20 years Tanika has written over 20 stage plays that have been produced in major theatres across the UK. She has written 30 radio plays for the BBC and several original television dramas, as well as scripts for EastEnders, Grange Hill and The Bill. She has taught drama and run workshops in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Cuba, India, USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Argentina, Chile and across the UK. She is a fellow of Rose Bruford College, runs courses for the Arvon Foundation and has led playwriting workshops in many UK universities (including Central School of Speech & Drama in London, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Oxford Universities), as well as for the National Theatre, Royal Court, Hampstead, Young Vic and Theatre Royal Stratford East. Tanika has been writer in residence at the National Theatre and at Soho Theatre, a fellow at the Playwright’s Studio in Glasgow and a writing tutor in Winchester Women’s prison. She has won numerous awards for her work. She is presently a visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London and Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Born in London the year after her parents arrived from Calcutta, Tanika’s earliest memories are of performing dance dramas by Rabindranath Tagore with her parent’s cultural group “The Tagoreans” across the European continent. After graduating from Oxford University Tanika worked as a community worker and in an Asian women’s refuge for several years. Tanika began writing drama in the early 1990s and for some time was also a script reader for BBC TV’S ‘Black screen’. She became a full-time writer in 1996 and has established a successful career in theatre with regular forays into TV, radio and film. She has always worked closely with a wide range of contemporary writers and drama practitioners both in the UK and around the world. Tanika’s play, The Empress has been added to the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9–1) English Literature syllabus. www.tanikagupta.com #DiversityInLitConf19 7 Our speakers Key note speaker: Ndidi Okezie Ndidi is Vice President of Secondary Portfolio, UK Schools for Pearson and co-host of Pearson’s, exciting education debate podcast: @GoWithMeOnThis.