The Waste Land 100th Birthday Celebration

On Saturday April 30, 2022, at the State Library of South Australia, the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice will co-host a celebratory event with the University of Adelaide’s Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This landmark event of Modernist literature has puzzled and awed readers ever since it first appeared in The Dial in November 1922— polyglot, cosmopolitan, formally heterogeneous, recondite, dramatic, epic, intertextual, allusive, enigmatic, satiric, despairing, the poem reaches heights of intensity and feeling few have scaled since.

We will conduct a full reading of the poem, feature musical performances of the poem’s musical references, have a round-table discussion by poets of the place of the poem in contemporary poetry, and a discussion by literary scholars of its place in the cultural history of the twentieth century and beyond. Prepare to re-encounter one of the incontestable masterpieces of world literature on its centenary.

Featuring: 

Jill Jones | Poet/Critic

Konstantin Shamray | Concert Pianist

Patrick Flanery | Novelist/Critic

Ann Vickery | Poet/Critic

Nicholas Jose | Novelist/Critic

together with:  Aidan Coleman, Thom Sullivan, Julian Murphet, Sean Pryor, Maggie Tonkin, Benjamin Madden