The IES Sambrook Appeal: The Next Chapter
At The IES Sambrook Appeal: The Next Chapter event, we celebrated the life of Keith Sambrook, one of the Institute's earliest Associate Fellows and a highly successful publisher at Heinemann Education Books, where he played a leading role in the influential African Writers Series. In addition to Keith’s impressive contribution to the literary world, and in particular his contributions to the MA in the History of the Book, we celebrated the impact Keith has had on our student community through the Sambrook Fund. Watch the event video
We were delighted to be joined by writer and poet, Patience Agbabi who talked about her most recent book The Infinite. We also introduced Dr Sarah Pyke, the Institute’s newly appointed Post-Doctoral Research Fellow for the Toolkit for Inclusion and Diversity in English Studies (TIDE), a Fellowship generously funded by the Convocation Trust.
This exclusive event for alumni and friends of the Institute will also served to launch the IES Sambrook Appeal. This appeal, in honour of the life and work of Keith Sambrook, aims to raise vital funds in support of the next generation of IES students and scholars. This support allows us to attract the best and brightest students to the Institute, regardless of their personal or financial circumstances and is a crucial step in promoting equality, diversity and inclusion at the Institute.
About the speaker
Patience Agbabi’s poetry has been featured on radio and TV worldwide. She has spent over 20 years celebrating the written and spoken word, and was nominated one of the UK’s ‘Next Generation Poets’ (2004). Her work has appeared in a broad range of anthologies, on TV and radio, the London Underground and human skin. Her poem, The Doll’s House, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2014. Patience studied English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and is a former Poet Laureate of Canterbury. The author of five books, a novel for middle graders, The Infinite (Canongate, 2020) and four poetry collections including Telling Tales (Canongate, 2014), which is a vivid retelling of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales for the 21st century and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize for New Work in Poetry 2014 and was a Wales Book of the Year (2015). “The liveliest versions of Chaucer you're likely to read” - Simon Armitage