Maya Angelou: A Celebration, The Southbank Centre

Jon Snow, Moira Stuart and many more special guests join together to celebrate the truly phenomenal woman with an evening of tributes including songs, poems and personal recollections.

Jon Snow, Moira Stuart and many more special guests join together to celebrate Maya Angelou, a truly phenomenal woman, with an evening of tributes including songs, poems and personal recollections. The full cast of speakers will be announced soon; we predict that plenty of illustrious writers, artists and performers will want to be a part of this commemoration. 

About Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou died on 28th May 2014, aged 86. She was beloved across the world and her tremendous energy touched every area of her career. Her series of seven autobiographies, that crossed the traditional lines of that form, span every chapter of her life, beginning with her youth up to age seventeen in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

It was a life fit to burst with experiences, not only as poet and writer, but also actor, journalist, victim, dancer, teacher, prostitute, streetcar conductor and mother. The canon of literature she leaves behind has been endlessly condensed into quotes, small parcels of the simple wisdom for which she was famed. Her literary voice swung from this homespun honesty to the resoundingly direct and vulgar, a mark of her fearlessness.

Familiar too was her physical voice, which sang out over Washington for President Clinton’s first inaugural address in 1993. She read her poem On the Pulse of Morning - it became an instant bestseller.

A voice for the state, and for quieter conversations; Angelou told the Guardian in 2009 of the thousands of letters she still received from young women, her global ‘daughters’, who looked to her as some kind of wise woman.