Wordsworth re-written by homeless Britain: the 2025 A&PE Award Winner
The K-SAA Arts & Public Engagement Award recognizes work that brings Romantic-era literature into meaningful dialogue with the present. In 2025, the Association honored Refuge from the Ravens, a powerful and collaborative project that rethinks what it means to engage Romantic texts in public-facing, socially grounded ways.
Rather than focusing on an individual scholar, this year’s award highlights a collective effort—one that reflects K-SAA’s commitment to experimental, community-driven scholarship. Refuge from the Ravens offers a twenty-first-century reimagining of Lyrical Ballads, remixing Wordsworth and Coleridge through poetry, film, and sound to address urgent contemporary issues, including housing insecurity, recovery, and social inequality.
Developed through creative workshops with individuals affected by homelessness and marginalization, the project centers lived experience as a vital form of knowledge. Participants are not simply audiences but collaborators—writers, artists, and interpreters whose work reshapes canonical texts through their own perspectives. In doing so, the project challenges traditional hierarchies of expertise and demonstrates how Romantic literature can remain responsive, dynamic, and deeply human.
The impact of Refuge from the Ravens has been both wide-reaching and deeply personal. The project has engaged more than twenty thousand visitors across the UK, including audiences at major public venues such as the Houses of Parliament, while also reaching broader communities online. At the same time, it has fostered transformative creative practices among participants, using poetry and collaboration as tools for reflection, expression, and renewal.
What makes this project especially compelling is its model of public humanities work: attentive, ethical, and genuinely collaborative. It invites us to reconsider how Romantic texts circulate today—not only in classrooms and archives, but in communities, conversations, and creative acts that extend far beyond the academy.
We encourage you to explore Refuge from the Ravens in more depth—watch the interview, read the transcripts, and experience the project’s multimedia work. It offers an inspiring example of how Romanticism can be reimagined through community, creativity, and care.
