Lyn Lockwood - Introduction to the 2024 PLS Conference

Lyn Lockwood, Deputy Chair of The Philip Larkin Society welcomes delegates to the 2024 conference, 'Something fidgety and various: 50 years of High Windows' held at the University of Hull 14-15th March 2024.
The conference invited contributors to use 'High Windows' as a starting point for exploring and interrogating the work of Philip Larkin and his contemporaries.
It’s 1974 and Larkin has been forced to leave behind the high windows of his Pearson Park flat and move into his final home at Newland Park. The ongoing miners’ strikes threaten to turn off the lights across the country. Barry Bloomfield’s Bibliography of Larkin’s publications nags at him, the dates on the cover suggesting to Larkin that there’s ‘a tombstone being lowered over me’. Although Larkin goes on to publish one of his greatest poems - ‘Aubade’- three years later, High Windows is his final collection, even though he is only in his early fifties. However, sales of the collection are ‘exceptional- nearly 20,000 copies in less than a year - and, as Andrew Motion suggests, ‘High Windows turned him into a national monument.’