22 - 23 November 2018, University of Reading
​As part of Beckett Week 2018, this two-day event invites academics, practitioners and postgraduates to engage in discussions surrounding Samuel Beckett’s involvement in early Modernist periodicals and his creative relationships in theatre. The conference, supported by the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading, will use the Beckett archive at the university to explore the diverse literary and performance networks that continue to spread across disciplines and genres. ​

Award-winning novelist and inaugural Beckett Fellow, Eimear McBride, has made a radio programme with RTE Dublin about the Samuel Beckett archive at the University of Reading. The programme includes contributions by James Knowlson, Beckett's authorised biographer, and by colleagues at the University. In the broadcast, Eimear discusses also the significance of Beckett's work for her as a woman writer, and gives evocative insight into Beckett's late prose work, Stirrings Still. 

​Eimear was appointed as the Beckett Centre's Inaugural Creative Fellow in September 2017. Her remit was to make visits to the Samuel Beckett archives held at the University and make new creative work from her engagement with the materials she found there. This new work will be launched at a public event this Autumn, where the author will discuss her responses to Samuel Beckett. Details of these events and the new work will follow.

During her fellowship, Eimear has produced a series of reflections about her evolving relationship to Beckett’s work through the archive. ​​

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The Samuel Beckett Centre is establishing conversations around the legacy of Beckett’s work with creative artists across all genres and media. We're pursuing ways of reconceiving his writing in the 21st century by using the University's extensive archival materials on Beckett as inspiration for the creation of new drama, prose fiction, music, and visual art.

As an exciting marker of this initiative, the Centre was launched in May 2017 with a lecture by the Scottish novelist James Kelman. The Booker Prize winning author of nine novels, as well as short stories and plays, adopts a similarly radical view to Beckett’s about the writer’s need to challenge linguistic and social convention, reconsider the writer’s relation to nationhood, and use fiction to explore philosophical and political ideas.

James reflects on the origin of his own awareness of Beckett’s work, on what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of Beckett’s writing, and the lessons that might be learnt by contemporary writers from Beckett. The whole launch event can be viewed below, with James Kelman's talk starting at 13'42".