Dr Kate Kennedy (Associate Director, Oxford Centre for Life-Writing) has been nominated for a major award for Dweller in Shadows, her biography of extraordinary English poet and composer Ivor Gurney.
It has been nominated for the Royal Philharmonic Society‘s Storytelling Award 2021. This is the most prestigious award for writing in classical music, and is ‘For a compelling and imaginative entity which furthered the understanding of classical music in a lateral medium – most likely but not limited to written or spoken word, radio, television, film, digital, online.’
Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as “Sleep.” Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist.
Dr. Kate Kennedy, a writer and broadcaster, is the Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, an associate of the Music Faculty, and a Research Fellow in Music and English at Wolfson College, Oxford. She has published widely on early twentieth-century music and literature, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 3. She lives near Oxford, England.
Please visit the Princeton University Press website for further information about the book, and the Royal Philharmonic Society website for information on the award.
