Summer at City Lit

Black London is shifting and ever-evolving. This course explores how Costa award winning Caleb Nelson’s novel ‘Open Water’ and the great 1950’s classic of immigrant fiction, Sam Selvon’s ‘The Lonely Londoners’ reimagined our multicultural metropolis.

The experience of living in Berlin in the early 1930s had a transformative effect on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood. In this course, we will discuss Isherwood’s masterpiece, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), and his autobiography Christopher and His Kind (1976), which reveals the real people behind the characters of Sally Bowles and Otto Nowak, and shines a light on the queer culture of Berlin Isherwood was unable to write about in the 1930s.

Study sculptors from the Renaissance to the Post-Modern, including Donatello, Bernini, Canova, Rodin, Picasso and Whiteread, considering styles, materials, and techniques of key works within social and cultural contexts.

Nowadays there are so many ways to watch film - smart phones, tablets, TVs - just as there are so many different spaces in which we encounter the moving image - cinemas, galleries, our homes, to name but a few. This day-long course will broaden and deepen your critical awareness of the diverse formal and experiential possibilities of cinema, both as they have developed in the past and as they are transforming in the contemporary moment. It will do this by reflecting on two questions: ‘what is cinema?’ and ‘where is cinema?’.

What is the role of poetry ‘off the page’ in public spaces? Can a poem change the way we might re-encounter cultural history? Do statues serve as ‘informants’ from the past? We read poetry by Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay and Dorothea Smartt commissioned for bridges, pavements, monuments, even super sewer ventilation shafts to identify the challenges, revisions and celebrations that emerge from exploring the place of poetry in public spaces.

This online course offers an introduction to the concept of the 21st century British dramatist as a social observer, enabling a deeper understanding of how playwrights can illuminate and comment on social issues. Join us to find out how playwrights Polly Stenham, Jez Butterworth and Phillip Ralph have interrogated a variety of societal ills including a miscarriage of justice, dependency issues, class and the façade of contentment amongst the upwardly mobile.

In July 2025 a major solo exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray, considered to be one of Australia’s greatest artists, will be held at Tate Modern. This course aims to introduce British audiences to the oeuvre of this remarkable artist.

Why do we value art? For the pleasure it gives us, the emotion it expresses, its truthfulness, its form? In this introduction to the philosophy of art we will consider various approaches to these questions and others.

All cultures respect the world of Story. The ability to tell Stories, in a variety of settings, is a skill that has seen a strong resurgence, both in the workplace, and in contemporary performance. Gain confidence and experience in storytelling on this intensive summer course.

Do you want to sound more confident, grounded, self-assured and assertive? Improve your vocal skills through a series of exercises that will support you to become more vocally confident, expressive and dynamic without appearing arrogant.

Ranging from sixteenth century love sonnets via bawdy Restoration verse to a Victorian eroticised poetic narrative, this course examines how the language of love and desire, and the poetic representations of gendered bodies, provide an idiom that can be used to express both conservative and more subversive cultural ideas.