Jon Stallworthy has been a Professor of English Literature at Cornell and Oxford, and he is a Fellow of the British Academy. He is currently Acting President of Wolfson College Oxford. His books include two critical studies of Yeats’s poetry; editions of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and a biography of Wilfred Owen (1975) which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the W.H. Smith Literary Award. His biography of Louis MacNeice was published in 1995 and won the Southern Arts Prize. Jon Stallworthy’s Collected Poems and an autobiography, Singing School, were published in 1998.

Jonathan Allison "Ink is a God-damned frigid medium, isn't it?": Reading Louis MacNeice's letters      mp3

Jonathan Allison lectures in English at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He is the editor of Yeats’s Political Identities (1996), and co-editor with Andrew Roberts of Poetry and Contemporary Culture: The Question of Value (2002). He is currently working on an edition of Louis MacNeice’s Selected Letters.

Peter McDonald The Pity of it All     mp3

The First BBC Louis MacNeice Memorial Lecture

Peter McDonald has published three collections of poems, most recently Pastorals (2004). He holds the Christopher Tower Tutorship in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, Oxford, and a lectureship in the English Faculty of Oxford University. His books include Louis MacNeice: The Poet in his Contexts (1991), Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1997) and Serious Poetry (2002). He co-edited Selected Plays of Louis MacNeice (1993), and has re-edited, for Faber, MacNeice’s Collected Poems (2007).

Terence Brown Weaving his Journey: MacNeice & Travel     mp3

Terence Brown is Professor of Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin, where he is also a Senior Fellow. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and of the Academia Europaea, and has lectured widely on Irish literature and Irish cultural history. His books include Louis MacNeice: Sceptical Vision (1975), Northern Voices (1975), Ireland: A Social and Cultural History: 1922 to the Present (1995) and The Life of W.B. Yeats (1999).

Clair Wills Post-war MacNeice     mp3

Clair Wills is Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She edited the Contemporary Writing section of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes IV and V (2002). Her books include Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993) and Reading Paul Muldoon (1998). This year (2007) she published with Faber That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War, which takes its title from Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Neutrality’.

Paul Muldoon teaches at Princeton University . He has published ten books of poetry with Faber, and won a Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. In 2006 he published Horse Latitudes, a new collection of poems, and The End of the Poem , his lectures as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 

Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christ College, Oxford. He has lectured widely around the world and has been a Visiting Professor in the USA, Australia and Germany. He reviews widely for various British and American journals and newspapers, and broadcasts regularly for BBC radio on literary and musicological topics. He has twice been a judge for the Booker Prize. His books include British Writers of the Thirties (1988) and Reading After Theory (2002).

Neil Corcoran is King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, and previously taught at the universities of Sheffield, Swansea and St Andrews. His books include a study of Seamus Heaney, English Poetry since 1940 (1993), and Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (2004). He is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry, due in 2008.