St Andrews Festival of Languages

I am the director of the Festival of Languages at the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews.

StAnza Poetry Festival

From 1997-2000, I was founding director of the StAnza Poetry Festival, which holds its 30th edition in 2027. Here you can find the programmes of the first three StAnzas:

StAnza 1998 programme
StAnza 1999 programme
StAnza 2000 programme

There is also the recording of a spoken word performance by Mark E Smith and Bill Herbert at StAnza 2000.

On the website of the St Andrews Festival of Languages, which I launched in 2024, you can listen to a seminar on translating poetry which, at StAnza 98, brought together an impressive range of participants, including John Burnside, Edwin Morgan, Ian Higgins, Michael Alexander and Brian and Harvey Holton.

The Hacienda must be built

On 27-28 January 1996, I co-organised, with Andrew Hussey, a conference on situationist revolt at the legendary Haçienda night club in Manchester. The club’s name was inspired by Ivan Chtcheglov’s text on ‘unitary urbanism’, which declared: ‘The Hacienda must be built’ (the ‘Hacienda’ being a place in an imagined city where citizens came to throw off the shackles of everyday life).

Contributors to the conference, and the subsequent book (which you can download below), included Anthony H Wilson, Mark E Smith, Jon King, Stewart Home, Ralph Rumney, Patrick ffrench and David Bellos. The event was widely denounced as ‘academic recuperation’ and even demonstrated against by ‘pro-situ’ elements…

The Hacienda must be built—part one (pdf)
The Hacienda must be built—part two (pdf)