About this day
For A-level students of the AQA A specification
This inspirational study day will provide comprehensive support for all students tackling the AQA A A-level option ‘Love Through the Ages’. Outstanding speakers will enthuse, inform and entertain with a diverse range of talks on poetry, prose and drama. This programme will give students the vital information, insights and confidence to achieve maximum examination success.
Programme & speakers
Wendy Cope Wendy Cope OBE, Poet
Wendy Cope will read from and discuss her work. This humorous and insightful session will help students explore and understand the meaning behind the words they read. She will invite questions from the audience.
About Wendy Cope OBE
Wendy Cope is a contemporary poet whose work is best known for its humour and parody, often off-set with self-reflection. She has a keen eye for the everyday, mundane aspects of English life.
Love in Shakespeare Nick Hutchison, Actor, Director and Lecturer
Nick Hutchison will explore how Shakespeare presents and stages ideas about love and romance across tragedy and comedy using examples from Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale. There will be an opportunity for questions.
About Nick Hutchison
Nick Hutchison is an actor, director and lecturer who has directed Shakespeare’s plays across the globe. He lectures for Shakespeare’s Globe, LAMDA, RADA and universities worldwide on Elizabethan and Jacobean Theatre.
Reading Narratives of Love Over Time Simon Avery, University of Westminster
Simon Avery will consider the complex idea of love in the novel and how love is shaped by social, political and historical factors, drawing on examples from Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Awakening and A Room With a View.
About Simon Avery
Dr Simon Avery is Reader in nineteenth-century literature and culture at the University of Westminster, where he teaches courses on fiction and poetry from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Changing Shapes of Love Poetry Carol Leach, Examiner, Teacher and Textbook Author
Carol Ann Duffy has famously described the sonnet form as the ‘little black dress of poetry’ and the ‘perfect form for the love poem’ because a sonnet reads classy, whatever the occasion. This session will start with how the sonnet is perfect for expressions of love and then consider how other poetic forms have declared love through the ages, from Elizabethans to Romantics to twentieth-century Confessionals, using examples from Shakespeare, Wyatt, Blake, Burns and Sexton.
About Carol Leach
Carol Leach is an A-level and GCSE examiner and teacher. She was Principal Examiner for AQA and OCR for 15 years and is an Ofqual specification reviewer for GCSE and A-Level English.