Liberty Court House

Minster Rd

Ripon. HG4 1QS

 

 

Monday 15th September         7.00pm

 

 

Having been discharged in November, Wilfred Owen spent Christmas 1917 with the Manchester's reserve battalion at Scarborough. It was here he read Under Fire, the first-hand account of a French soldier's harrowing experiences in the Great War, and a strong influence on Owen's writing.

 

Thanks to Siegfried Sassoon, Owen also met several other authors in the late months of 1917, including Robert Graves - a fellow war poet - and H. G. Wells, the acclaimed science fiction author.

 

In March 1918 Owen was posted to Northern Command at Ripon, where he spent many of his off-duty hours writing in a rented attic; this period, which lasted until Wilfred was judged to be fit to serve again in June, ranks alongside the months in Craiglockhart as Owen's most poetically productive and important.