Join us in the Leavey Library auditorium for an evening with British poet, Richard Berengarten (previously known as Richard Burns), who will read from his book The Blue Butterfly, which responds to a massacre that occurred in 1941 near the town of Kragujevac, Serbia.

Born in London in 1943 into a family of musicians, Berengarten studied English at Cambridge (1961-1964) and Linguistics at University College London (1977-78). In 1975, he founded the international Cambridge Poetry Festival, which ran until 1985. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA, and has worked extensively in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland and Russia. His poetry integrates English, European, Slavic, Jewish, Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese and American traditions.

Berengarten is the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award (1972), the Keats Memorial Prize (1974), the Duncan Lawrie Prize (1982), the Yeats Club Prize (1989), the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Award for Poetry (1992), and the international Morava Charter Prize (2005). His book The Blue Butterfly provided the Veliki školski čas memorial-oratorio for Nazi massacre-victims in Kragujevac (Serbia, 2007).

Currently, Berengarten is a Praeceptor at Corpus Christi College and Bye-Fellow at Downing College. He also teaches at Christ’s College, Emmanuel College, Jesus College, Pembroke College and Peterhouse, Cambridge.

For more information about Richard Berengarten, visit http://www.berengarten.com/site/Biography.html .