More News to Bragg About
Find out who we’ve selected to produce work as part of the Inspired by Bragg programme.
Inspired by Bragg brings together minds and ideas from across the University of Leeds and beyond to celebrate Sir William Henry Bragg — a former professor at Leeds who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915. Through an open call, we’ve selected two writers to produce a children’s book and a poem to celebrate the launch launch of the new multi-million pound W H Bragg Building at the University of Leeds. Find out who they are.
Meet Zaffar Kunial
Zaffar Kunial is a Yorkshire based poet and Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at the University of Leeds Poetry Centre. Much of Zaffar’s work to date has drawn in creative ways on his rich cultural inheritance as an Anglo-Asian writer, and what he calls the “the legacy of exchanging words across the centuries.” Zaffar’s collection, Us, was the Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice 2018, and was shortlisted for both the Costa Book Award and the TS Eliot Prize. Among other honours, he won the top poetry award in the 2013 Northern Writers’ Awards, and was a Faber New Poet in 2014. He has been poet in residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Ilkley Literature Festival, and the Ledbury Literature Festival. A reading of his poem The Opener, from his collection Six, was recently performed to coincide with the final Test at the Oval, and can be heard from 1:45:34 online at BBC Sounds.
Meet Catherine Nichols
Dr Cath Nichols is a doctor of Creative Writing (not medicine or science!). She is interested in lots of curious things and is excited by the Bragg Institute’s commission to engage young children with the world of materials science. She teaches Writing for Children and Young Adults at Leeds University as well as a general Creative Writing module. Although she is based within the Lifelong Learning Centre, any student from any department in the university can take her modules, and she loves it when there is a good mix of students. Cath is currently short-listed on the Penguin Randomhouse children’s authors scheme for under-represented writers. She is disabled and queer, and thinks a lot about how these and other kinds of diversity show up in children’s fiction (or don’t!).
What is Inspired by Bragg?
Inspired by Bragg is a series of events and activities, celebrating the life of Nobel prize winner William Henry Bragg, and commemorating the launch of the new multi-million pound W H Bragg Building at the University of Leeds.
The Cultural Institute is producing a programme of cultural events leading up to the opening of the new W H Bragg Building at the University of Leeds in Summer 2022.
Named after Sir William Henry Bragg, a former professor at the University who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915, the new building will bring together the School of Physics and Astronomy and the School of Computing, creating an engineering and physical sciences hub on the north-east corner of campus.
Inspired by Bragg will mark the opening of the building with a cultural events programme which casts light on the interdisciplinary approach that underpins research at University of Leeds, taking as its inspiration the life and work of W H Bragg, and current Bragg Centre research.
It will include:
- a newly commissioned poem, to be performed at the opening of the building
- a children’s book which will celebrate the story of W H Bragg and his son William Lawrence, their research or research with a clear link to Bragg’s discoveries/research
- exhibitions in the W H Bragg Building itself, and in the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery — Find out more here
- musical compositions, as part of the University’s International Concert Series
- narrative theatre pieces inspired by Bragg’s life
- activities for Light Night, an annual art and light festival in Leeds
The programme has been developed in partnership with University of Leeds Poetry Centre, Public Engagement with Research, stage@leeds, Leeds University Library Galleries and School of Music.
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