Summer School

The 27th John Hewitt International Summer School will take place from Monday 28th July – Friday 1st August 2014 in the Market Place Theatre, Armagh. Programme details will be announced here in spring 2014.

Poets have long celebrated ‘place’ in poetry of landscape, community, and tradition. John Hewitt affirmed both the richness and severities of Belfast, and the beauty and familiarity of the Antrim Glens where he saw himself as a welcomed, but strange, migratory bird. Despite his long settled antecedents, he was to find himself an ‘incomer’ when he moved to the English Midlands in his fifties.

People have always travelled, for work or love, in fear and in hope, but no era witnessed as much movement of populations as the past century. What is the place, ‘the local’ in the twenty-first century? In a world of globalised entertainment and communication, and increasingly migratory labour, is there room for sentiment about place in our art?

Is the ‘living among strangers’ that allowed separate, mutually opposed cultures to develop here over four hundred years to be the norm for future populations? Will diversity reduce conflict, or increase antagonism between hosts and guests? Can those of different backgrounds and histories share increasingly fragmented spaces?

View Summer School programme