2008 Contemporary Arts Programme

The Telegraph & Argus highlights the most interesting Contemporary Arts Programme events that will be held at the Brontë Parsonage Museum this year:

Five-times Booker Prize nominee Dame Beryl Bainbridge is to headline a season of arts programmes looking at how the Bronte sisters continue to influence people.
She is one of a series of leading writers and artists who have agreed to contribute to this year's Brontë Parsonage Museum Contemporary Arts Programme.
It will also explore how contemporary writers influence each others creative work.
And it will be something of coup for the organisers who will be displaying for the first time ever letters between the former Poet Laureate, the late Ted Hughes, and leading British photographer Fay Godwin.
Dame Beryl will be visiting Haworth in June during the week of the Bronte Society annual festival to read from and discuss her writing.
Her latest novel is According to Queenie, a fictionalised account of Dr Johnson's friend Hester Thrale.
Also lined up is award-winning poet and novelist Simon Armitage, who hails from Huddersfield. He will be reading and discussing a selection of his work at West Lane Baptist Chapel, in Haworth, later in June.
Leading British photographer Fay Godwin will be exhibiting some of her landscape work from her collaboration with Ted Hughes, who was inspired to write verse in response to her images..
The photographs of Yorkshire will be on loan from the British Museum.
Jenna Holmes, Bronte Parsonage Arts Officer, said: "The exhibition will also include previously unpublished manuscript correspondence between Hughes and Godwin.
"The programme aims to celebrate the ways in which the Brontes' lives and works have continued to inspire writers and artists across three centuries. We also aim to commission and showcase new responses to the Brontes and their works from established writers and artists working today.
"It also seeks to encourage regional creative talent, offering opportunities to collaborate on special projects."
The programme also coincided with the Bronte Parsonage Museum's 2008 special exhibition focusing on Emily Bronte.
Authors Bonnie Greer, Helen Dunmore, Patsy Stoneman and Toby Litt will talk about how Emily's novel Wuthering Heights has had a special influence.
Throughout the summer there would be a series of events giving museum visitors chance to work with artists and to experience the museum in different ways, she added.
The Contemporary Arts programmes has author and media pundit Germaine Greer as its honorary patron. (Clive White)

In the pictures: Dame Beryl Banbridge (© Little, Brown); Top Withens, Calder Valley, 1977 by Fay Godwin

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, In the News