November Exiled Lit Cafe
Thursday 7th November at 6.30 pm

at

Camden Art Centre

Free Event

A Home in English

Hear some wonderful writers and a discussion about writing in English while having another language as mother tongue.

How easy or difficult is it to feel at home in English, while you might speak another language as well or even better? English might be your second language or it might have become your first language, even if it is not your mother tongue. Or you might also write in other languages besides English. So we will explore the question of whether writing in another language offers advantages or whether it is mainly a disadvantage.

with

Marsha Glenn: poet and journalist – Xaviera Ringeling – poet and environmentalist – Kostya Tsolakis: poet and editor – Tamara Wilson: poet and scholar

Music by Alan Levy

Open Mic

Marsha Glenn is from Bangladesh, where she worked as a journalist. During her journey in the UK for the last decade, she has been forced to identify herself as an asylum seeker, foreigner, job snatcher and public liability. Whereas, Marsha relentlessly pursues to regain her identity as resilient, thinker, activist, compassionate and grateful for the life she has made in the UK. She is a member of the Freedom from Torture creative writing group Write to Life. She has worked with journalist and writer Simon Hattenstone and the Guardian during her involvement in the Refugee Journalism Project 2018-2019’. Marsha regularly contributes to Freedom from Torture online publications. She was published in Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction in 2023. She has been published in the Exiled Ink magazine and the Guardian online feature section. She performs in local charity events such as NW Live Arts, Together Productions, Victoria and Albert Museum and fundraising events of several charities for the wellbeing of refugees in the UK.

Xaviera Ringeling is a London-based Chilean poet. Her poetry – written primarily in Spanish but also in English—navigates themes of identity, womanhood, belonging and breaking free from patriarchal and neo-liberal world views. She holds a degree in Philosophy from Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Chile, and an MS in Environmental Studies from University College, London. Her pamphlet La oblicua luz de la tarde was awarded the XXXII Premio Voces Nuevas by the Spanish publisher Torremozas, and was included in an anthology by this publisher, as well as in the anthology Leyendo Poesía in London. Her first poetry collection, Alba, was published in London by El Ojo de la Cultura in 2019. Xaviera’s poetry can be read in translation in the bilingual anthology of Latin American poets in the UK, Equidistant Voices. Her second collection, Vientre was published this year by Equidistancias.

Kostya Tsolakis wrote Greekling (Nine Arches Press, 2023), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted in 2024 for the Polari First Book Prize and Runciman Award. He is the founding editor of harana poetry, the online magazine for poets writing in English as a second or parallel language. In 2019, Kostya won the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition (ESL category), judged by Jackie Kay. His poems have been widely published in magazines, including fourteen poems, Magma Poetry, Poetry London and Poetry Review, and anthologies, such as the Greek Queer Poetry Anthology (RLS Greece & Thraca, 2023), 100 Queer Poems (Vintage, 2022), and Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (Corsair, 2021).

Tamara Wilson is an award-winning poet, academic, and the chair of Exiled Writers Ink. Alongside her interdisciplinary doctoral research on the postcolonial legacy of the Ottoman Empire on the indigenous populations of Anatolia, she aims to shine a light on the various demands, denials and struggles of survival in her creative engagements. Her forthcoming genre-defying counter-memory text which won the award of Excellence in Literature in International Orthodox Arts Festival with unanimous vote in 2021, investigates the aftermath of Armenian Genocide and Greek ethnic cleansing from the lens of social death. Currently, she is working on several multidisciplinary projects including an ethnodrama play and a virtual museum.

Organised and hosted by Goran Baba Ali, EWI committee member.

Camden Art Centre
Arkwright Road (corner of Finchley Road and Arkwright Road)
London NW3 6DG
Tube: Finchley Road
Overground: Finchley Road & Frognal