Intelligence Squared presents
Raymond Antrobus on Creativity, Deafness and the Politics of Language
What does creativity look like when you’re missing one of the five senses?
Award-winning poet and author Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds – bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.
On October 8 Antrobus comes to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss how the deaf
experience can expand how we all think about language, writing and the spoken word.
Antrobus will draw on his new memoir The Quiet Ear to reflect on life and art at the intersection of worlds; growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father; navigating the mainstream and deaf schooling systems; and living between the world of sound and silence.
Join us at the Kiln Theatre and have your questions answered in the audience Q&A.
This event is part of Conversations at the Kiln, an event series at Kiln Theatre programmed by Intelligence Squared. For more curated conversations on literature, history, poetry and politics, click here.
Important Information
This event will be interpreted in British Sign Language (BSL).
Raymond Antrobus – Award-winning Poet and Author of The Quiet Ear
Author of three poetry titles: The Perseverance, All The Names Given, and Signs, Music, the
latter of which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. His work has won the Ted
Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year
Award, and his poems have been added to GCSE syllabi. In 2019 Raymond became the first
ever poet to be awarded the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. He
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021.
The Quiet Ear is his first work of prose.