On a beautiful sunlit Sunday afternoon, committee members of the Philip Larkin Society took part in a poetry reading event in the Avenues area of Hull to help raise funds for the Victoria Avenue Fountain appeal. The group read a selection of appropriate Larkin poems in some of the gardens along [...]

Blending profound meditation with stand up comedy and dressed in a pink creation designed by himself Grayson Perry held a packed Middleton Hall enthralled with his witty, highly personal account of his life and work. Middle class audiences, he noted, ‘do like a reference’, and there [...]

The opening of the wonderful new  Larkin Exhibition in the Brynmor Jones Library (of which we’re very proud), combined with Grayson Perry’s visit to Hull as our  Distinguished Guest Lecturer, is stimulating a huge amount of interest in ‘all things Larkin.’  As a result, [...]

The major biographic exhibition ‘Larkin: New Eyes Each Year’  at the University of Hull’s Brynmor Jones Library  is now open and is already generating an enormous amount of interest from press and public alike . The exhibition, curated by Anna Farthing and designed by Craig Oldham, offers [...]

As ever, it was a beautiful sunny day at the Lawns as over 30 members gathered for the Philip Larkin Society Annual General Meeting. New merchandise officers, Lyn Lockwood and Rachael Galletly, welcomed us with the merchandise stall and the joyous sounds of Larkin’s Jazz in the lobby and [...]

The latest issue of About Larkin, the Society’s journal, has now been published. It contains a wealth of new, previously unseen material relating to Larkin, including early family letters, which are reproduced as facsimiles by kind permission of his niece, Rosemary Parry. A fascinating [...]

The Philip Larkin Society is delighted to announce that Grayson Perry CBE RA is to be its Distinguished Guest Lecturer for 2017. The event will take place at the Middleton Hall, University of Hull on Wednesday 5th July. Grayson Perry is a particular Larkin fan and Larkin’s face features in [...]

Professor Graham Chesters was a university colleague of Larkin’s and is Vice Chairman of the Philip Larkin Society. Larkin is linked in the national consciousness with the city of Hull, which he called ‘the town that lets you write,’ although after his appointment as the [...]

On 2 October 1974 Larkin sent his mother a colour postcard of Prince Charles, saluting in military uniform : ‘I am in the train going down to London where I shall see Betjeman and go to Westminster Abbey to see him unveil a tablet to Auden.’ On the following day he sent a follow-up [...]

In celebration of Philip Larkin’s memorialisation in Poets’ Corner, the Friends of the Bodleian are to hold a  reading of Philip Larkin and Barbara Pym’s letters on Saturday, 10 December at 6pm in the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Libraries) in Oxford. Further details are [...]