She is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing (life-writing includes biography and memoir, and the ways in which we tell life stories) and a Research Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. She has published widely on twentieth century culture, particularly literature and music, and is interested in women's writing and composition, music and war, musical instruments and the stories they hold, the way in which we tell life stories, and in houses and the lives lived within them.
Her most recent publications include her memoir/biography Cello - A Journey Through Silence to Sound (Bloomsbury, 2024 - currently the best-selling publication on music), Dweller in Shadows - A Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton University Press, 2021), and co-written with Dame Hermione Lee: Lives of Houses (Princeton, 2020).
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Writing the Asylum: Ivor Gurney - Poet, Composer
Ivor Gurney (1890 - 1937) was one of the best composers of songs and poetry of the early twentieth century, but so little of his work is known. What people do know, they love. Who was he, and why was he so forgotten? Kennedy traces her 16 year project to reconstruct his life, from the trenches to the lunatic asylum, and to uncover a hidden genius.
Lives of Houses
What does the place we live say about us? When is a house a home? And how do we find the traces of lives long gone in the places they were lived? During 2020 Kate Kennedy and Dame Hermione Lee brought the UK's leading poets and biographers together to think about houses, and the lives lived in them. The book Lives of Houses was the result. Just as it was published, everyone found themselves confined to their own homes in lockdown. This talk helps us think about our environment, how we create and curate it, and what happens when we look for a life lived in a place that has since disappeared.
Cello - a Journey Through Silence to Sound
Kennedy takes her cello across Europe to follow in the footsteps of four forgotten cellists, erased by accident or war. She encounters a cello that has been turned into a bee hive, shipwreck and the holocaust. She thinks about silence, survival, and what it means to live your life with an instrument that is the nearest thing to the human body, and that holds its player's voice.
The Cello and the Nightingale - in search of cellist Beatrice Harrison
Musical Bloomsbury
Music's War Poets
Why Life-writing?
Write Your Life workshops
Formidable But Forgotten Women in Music
and ... almost any aspect of C20th British music!
'In Conversation' events with famous classical musicians, writers, composers and actors
Running workshops on creative writing, in particular life-writing, telling your story, getting started with writing and more
Sermons for Remembrance Sunday, thinking about the role of music in wartime
Solo talks on the titles above and more
Radio 3 and 4 documentaries and series on music and literature (most available on BBC Sounds, and all possible to adapt for talks)
Performances with celebrated actors and musicians, telling the stories of her books through music and script.
Dramatised recitals:
Through Silence to Sound (directed by Tom Morris, dramatising stories from the book Cello for two cellos, narrator and visuals)
To His Love (two singers, piano and narrator - a staged version of the story of poet-composer Ivor Gurney)
The Fateful Voyage (for singer and narrator, telling the story of Rupert Brooke and his companions' fateful journey to fight in Gallipoli)
Literary Britten (for singer, narrator and piano, telling the story of the friendship between WH Auden and Benjamin Britten)
A Music of One's Own (for singer, actor and piano, exploring Virginia Woolf's relationship to music through her own words)
The Dark Pastoral (for singer and narrator, a programme exploring songs celebrating landscape around the First World War)