NEWS

News: 17 December 2020

The Immortal Dinner Competition
The results are in!

Not surprisingly, the list includes a number of writers and poets, however, the final results show a mix of names, with artists, politicians, fictional characters, journalists, freedom fighters, philosophers and others from the world of music and entertainment.

In FIRST place with 4 nominations, are Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Oscar Wilde; we can only imagine how the conversations would have flowed throughout the evening!

In joint SECOND position with three nomination are Robert Burns, Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Bob Dylan, William Shakespeare, Kamala Harris and Stephen Fry.  Never a lull in the conversation with this line-up of illustrious guests.

Coming in a close THIRD with 2 votes each, are Percy Bysshe Shelley, Josiah Wedgwood, W H Auden, Leigh Hunt, John Milton, Dante Alighieri, Sir Bob Geldof, John-Jacques Rousseau and Aristophanes.

Each claiming an individual vote, John Keats might have looked forward to a lively and entertaining dinner in the company of the following guests!

Alice Coltrane
Edith Sitwell
Scott Fitzgerald
Sir Les Patterson
Sylvia Plath
Orson Welles
Joy Harjo
Giacomo Leopardi
Sir Ivor Roberts
Voltaire
Noam Chomsky
Benjamin Zephaniah
Robert Graves
Antonio Canova
Annette Summerskill
Thomas Chatterton
Seamus Heaney
Anna Ricciardi
Sherlock Holmes
Dick King-Smith
Gertrude Bell
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Mary Anning
Laskarina Bouboulina
Philip K Dick
Anne Frank
John Mortimer
Sir David Attenborough
W B Yeats
John Ruskin
Pliny the Younger
Nelson Mandela
Michael Stipe
Wilfred Owen
Amelia Earhart
Emily Brontë
Joseph Severn
Jorge Luis Borges
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Stella Gibbons
Allen Ginsberg
Michelle Obama
Winston Churchill
George Frederick Handel
Orpheus
Freida Kahlo
Michael Hutchence
Sophocles
Lizzie Bennett
Leonard Cohen
Woody Allen
Virginia Wolf
Thomas Hardy
Frankenstein’s Creature
Thomas Gainsborough
T S Eliot
Stormzy
Seamus Heaney
Freddie Mercury
Prometheus
Richard E Grant
Plato
Armistead Maupin
Essex Hemphill
Neil Hannon (of Divine Comedy)
Christopher Isherwood
Marie Lockhart Michiovἁ
Audre Lorde
James Boswell
Aphra Behn
Anna Karenina
Ian McMillan (The Barnsley Poet)
Herodotus
William Hazlitt
Harriet Martineau
George Elliot (Mary Ann Evans)
Lady Emma Hamilton
Emily Bronte
Edward Thomas
Eavan Boland
Lord Byron
Aphrodite
Adam Mickiewicz
Amy Winehouse
Virginia Woolf

A warm thank you to everyone who cast their nominations to make The Immortal Dinner competition such a fitting tribute to literary London at its most vibrant.

A number of the Keats-Shelley 200 activities and events have been postponed due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but the programme will go ahead during 2021 and 2022.

In the meantime, you can enjoy our KS200 digital programme which includes a Google Earth map of John Keats' Final Voyage from London to Rome in 1820, readings of Keats, Shelley and Byron by Julian Sands and the Keats-Shelley Podcast.

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