Literature Cambridge
info@literaturecambridge.co.uk
Literature Cambridge was set up in 2015 by Trudi Tate, an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall who teaches Victorian and modern literature at Cambridge and has a passion to bring great literature in English to readers all over the world.
Literature Cambridge launched with a series of summer schools in which participants spend a week immersed in the life and works of their favourite authors. Enlisting many luminaries to teach, from ground-breaking Cambridge art historians Frances Spalding and Claudia Tobin to brilliant literary scholars Dame Gillian Beer, Susan Sellers, Isobel Maddison, Karina Jakubowicz, Claire Nicholson, Claire Davison, Alison Hennegan, Ellie Mitchell, Suzanne Raitt, and many others, Trudi’s summer courses have been a resounding success. They offer a summer course on Virginia Woolf each year. This runs twice: once live online, then again in person here in Cambridge. In 2025, the theme will be Virginia Woolf: Writing Life.
In 2020, Literature Cambridge created an exciting series of Online Study Sessions. These attract lovers of literature from all over the world as well as locally. A group of superb lecturers, all with a Cambridge connection, provide top quality lectures and seminars, live online via Zoom.
They study a great range of writers: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, E.M. Forster, Ivor Gurney, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville West, Zora Neale Hurston, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Angela Carter, Philip Larkin, refugee writers, and more. Lecturers include Gillian Beer, Kasia Boddy, Anne-Laure Brevet, Claire Davison, Clare Walker Gore, Angela Harris, Alison Hennegan, Karina Jakubowicz, Ellie Mitchell, Lisa Mullen, Fred Parker, Jan Parker, Adrian Poole, Corinna Russell, Ann Kennedy Smith, Hugh Stevens, Trudi Tate, Mariah Whelan and many others.
They run a regular season of live online lectures on Virginia Woolf. The current Woolf Season is on the theme of Woolf and Politics and runs from September 2024 to June 2025. You can book for as many or as few sessions as you like. Places are limited and sessions often sell out.
Literature Cambridge also offer live online weekly and fortnightly courses on special topics, including:
2024
• Virginia Woolf Season, September 2024 to June 2025
• The Contemporary Novel course, October to December 2024
• Close Reading Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, November to December 2024
• Close Reading Irish Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, December 2024
• Lecture for Peace: Woolf, A Room of One’s Own: After the First World War, 27 December 2024. Lecture to raise money for peace and refugee charities.
2025
• Passion and Violence in Greek and Shakespearean Tragedy, January-February 2025
• Women Writers Season, January to December 2025
• Close Reading Anne Sexton, January 2025
• Close Reading Sylvia Plath, February 2025
• Bloomsbury: Art and Politics, February-March 2025
• Iris Murdoch and Art course, March-May 2025
• Oscar Wilde course, March-May 2025
• Comedy and Irony in the Young Jane Austen course, May 2025
• Katherine Mansfield: Stories of Life and Death, May-June 2025
• Close Reading Mary Oliver, June 2025
• Virginia Woolf Online Summer Course 2025: Writing Life, July 2025
• Doris Lessing: Women and Destiny course 2025 September-October 2025
• London in Literature 2: 1950s to the Present, September-November 2025
• George Orwell: Power, Freedom, Decency, November-December 2025
• Elizabeth von Arnim: Women, Men and Dogs course, October-December 2025
Photo credit: Seb Peters and Jeremy Peters