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About

Named by the British Council as “One of Britain’s leading poetry and prose performers”, Ruth Rosen is a pioneer in delivering poetry and prose to audiences which reach from Wembley Stadium to the Oval Hall in Moscow.

 

Having played leading roles in the theatre in South Africa as an actress, she moved to London and joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. Due to the onset of hearing loss, it became increasingly clear to her that she had to move into what mattered most to her: delivering Poetry to audiences worldwide.

 

Rosen's extraordinary career includes her human rights work for the ANC during the apartheid era with South African protest poetry, alongside her work on behalf of Soviet dissidents. She was the first person to give a public reading of Ahkmatova's Requiem, the manuscript of which had just been smuggled out of Russia.  At the time of Perestroika, the British Council sent Rosen to take "poetry parcels" to Russian audiences to bridge the cultures between the two countries.

 

She has done innumerable readings on the Holocaust. These include the annual Commemorations of the Liberation of Auschwitz; "Speak the Unspeakable" with Harold Pinter (eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust); the annual "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" tributes at the Adelphi Theatre; and readings from the great writers of the Holocaust - Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan and Aharon Appelfeld.

 

Ruth's solo shows and dramatised readings, which she has devised and researched herself, are based on the work of a wide range of writers and other personalities.  These include Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Lou Andreas-Salome, John Keats, William Blake, Turner, Burne-Jones, James Joyce, Gandhi, Emily Brontë, George Sand, Elizabeth Bishop, Anna Freud, the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and Scottish poet W.S. Graham.   

 

Her collaboration with Harold Pinter and W.S. Graham became the formation of a rare and inspiring trio. 

 

Rosen's ability to get inside the skin of the poets, breathing life into their words, ushers audiences into the soul of their poetry. 

 

Her reviews and resume alone are worth reading. 

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