2025
Long Live Poetry
Long Live Poets
1 session
Thursday 23rd January
at Camden Art Centre Free Event
Organised and hosted by Ziba Karbassi, EWI editorial and
committee member
ARTWORK BY AIDA WILDE
Art Centre, Arkwright Road, NW3 6DG
Poets & Artists Yang Lian, YoYo, Matthew Caley, Sascha Aurora Akhtar, James Byrne, Sana Nassari and Dr Peyman Heydarian Yang Lian’s work is translated by Brian Holton, and YoYo’s by Callisto Searle
Yang Lian, a Chinese poet, was born in Switzerland, grew up in China and now lives in London. He published 15 volumes of poetry, 2 volumes of prose, and many essays. His work has been translated into more 30 languages, and his representative works including YI, Where the Sea Stands Still; Concentric Circles; Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections; Lee Valley Poems, Narrative Poem, Anniversary Snow…etc. His works have been reviewed as “like MacDiarmid meets Rilke with Samurai sword drawn!'”, “one of the most representative voices of Chinese literature”. Among other awards, Yang Lian won 2024, The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (Poland), A Tower Built Downward, Yang Lian’s collection of poems in English translation, won the English PEN Award 2023; 2021 the first Sarah McGuire Prize for Poetry in Translation held by Poetry in Translation Centre; 2020, he won“Jiu Ge Prize”of the first Miluo Literature Prize in China; 2019 Premio Sulmona” in Italy; 2018 NordSud International Prize for Literature, Italy, The 2018 Janus Pannonius International Poetry Grand in Hungary. 2017, Narrative Poem was selected as a recommended translation by Poetry book Society in UK, as well as won the English PEN Award. 2016, he won the Pacific International Poetry Prize in Taiwan; 2014, the International Capri Prize; 2012, Nonino International Literature Prize. He has been elected a board member of PEN International PEN in 2008 and 2011. Yang Lian was a DAAD fellow in Berlin 1991– 1992 and a fellow of Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin 2012 – 2013. He was elected a board of PEN International at 2008 and 2011; 2013, he invited to become a member of The Norwegian Academy for Literature and Freedom of Expression in 2014.
YoYo is a novelist and a painter. She has published eleven books of Fiction and Non-fiction in Chinese, and two books, Ghost Tide (2005) and One Man’s Decision to Become a Tree (2023), in English translation. She has held solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in London, Berlin, France, Italy, Poland and many cities in China including , Beijing, Shanghai, Yangzhou, Shenyang and Shantou…etc. YoYo has won the special prize for the foreign artists of 46th International arts exhibition in Sulmona, Italy 2018. Her works has been collected by more than 100 institutions and private collectors worldwide. YoYo was invited to participate in international literary activities in different countries of the world, the USA, UK, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, India…etc. YoYo has been teaching SOAS (University of London), Eton College in Windsor, University of Sydney, and the University of Auckland. She is a Distinguished Professor at Shantou University in China. YoYo lives in Berlin and London as a free artist now.
Matthew Caley is a tutor/mentor for the Poetry School and has also recently taught poetry at the University of St Andrews, the University of Winchester and Royal Holloway University, London. His first collection, Thirst (Slow Dancer, 1999), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He has published six more since, four with Bloodaxe, Apparently (2010), Rake (2016), Trawlerman’s Turquoise (2019) and To Abandon Wizardry (2023). His work has featured in many anthologies, including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), Poems of the Decade (Forward Worldwide, 2011), The Picador Book of Love Poems (Picador, 2011), Pestilence (Lapwing, Belfast, 2020) and Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021). Prophecy Is Easy, a pamphlet of very loose versions from French twentieth century poets, was published by Blueprint in 2021. He’s read his work from StAnza in Fife – where he gave the St Anza Lecture 2020 – to the Globe Theatre, London; from Galway to the Czech Republic, to Novi Sad, Serbia. He lives in London with the Czech-born artist Pavla Alchin. https://www.matthew-caley.com
Sascha’s poetry has been widely anthologized, translated and performed internationally at festivals such as the Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, Avantgarde Festival Hamburg and Southbank Centre’s MELTDOWN festival London curated by Yoko Ono. Akhtar has been part of political poetry protests — Against Rape (Peony Moon, 2014) and Solidarity Park Poetry — Poems for the Turkish resistance (Ed. 2014). Solidarity Park Poetry was a project set up with poet Nia Davies and holds a permanent space of 60 protest poems curated by Sascha and Nia from global poets in solidarity. Akhtar was part of the seminal Catechism: Poems For Pussy Riot anthology supported by English Pen. Her poems were translated into Polish to be included in a zine distributed on a day of Women’s Protest in Poland. Her work was also part of The Chicago Review’s #MeToo protest edition.
Akhtar has authored six poetry collections with Salt UK, Shearsman UK, Contraband UK, Emma Press, Knives, Forks & Spoons Press & ZimZalla UK. The first, The Grimoire of Grimalkin (SALT UK, 2007) was called ‘ a contemporary masterpiece,’ by the Chair of the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at New York University, Phillip John Usher. Akhtar is a Poetry School London Tutor and has been a judge for the Streetcake Prize for Experimental Writing for 2019 and 2020. Her custom-made course Breaking Through Writer’s Block has been published by The Literary Consultancy, London as part of #BeingAWriter . In 2019, Poetry Wales named Poems For Eliot as the number one poem of the last five years and Only Dying Sparkles was featured on the Southbank Poetry Library acquisitions & at the University of Leeds Poetry By Design Exhibit in the same year. Akhtar continues to develop as a creative force, having recently published a prose collection set in the country of her birth, Pakistan. The collection Of Necessity And Wanting published on October 14th, 2020 is a study of the economics of want and the politics of need in a post-colonial environment. 2021 should see her book of translations of pioneering feminist fiction writer Hijab Imtiaz coming out with Oxford University Press, India. Her fiction has appeared in Storgy, The Learned Pig, Tears In The Fence, BlazeVox, Anti-Heroin Chic, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and most recently in The Fortnightly Review . Akhtar is an ACE-supported artist having received the #DYCP grant both in 2018 and in 2020. In 2019, her poems appeared in the Blackpool illuminations.
James Byrne is one of the leading poet of Britania also , editor, translator and visual artist living in London. His most recent poetry collection is The Overmind (2024, Broken Sleep Books). Others include Places you Leave (Arc Publications, 2022) and Of Breaking Glass (BSB, 2022). A Selected Poems, Nightsongs for Gaia, is due in 2025. Byrne was the editor of The Wolf, an influential, internationally-minded literary magazine between 2002 and 2017. In 2012, he co-translated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017). His co-translation with the author Ro Mehrooz of Rohingya poems, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, was published by Arc in October 2024.
Sana Nassari is a British-Iranian poet, writer, translator, and art historian based in London. She has published one novel and a collection of short stories, These Two Roses (Exiled Writer Ink, 2020). Her poetry collection O Delilah won second prize for an unpublished collection at the Journalists Poetry Award and Departure, a second collection of her poetry has been recently published by the reputable publishing house Morvarid in Iran. Sana has also translated two novels by the American writer Karen Joy Fowler and The Graveyard by Polish writer Marek Hłasko into Farsi. Her translation of The Certificate by Isaac Bashevis Singer is forthcoming. Sana holds an M.A. in the History of Art from SOAS, University of London. Since 2021, she has been actively contributing to Writers Mosaic magazine, specialising in art and literature reviews. Aida Wilde is an Iranian born; London based printmaker/ visual artist and educator and the founder of Print Is Power & Sisters In Print projects. Her outdoor public art installations include, Honk Kong Walls 2019, Shangri-La, Glastonbury Festival, Wood Street Walls, Adblock Bristol, Croydon Rise Festival & various Brandalism projects. Aida’s fine art studio based serigraphy has been exhibited nationally & internationally. Her residency at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, Empowered PrintWorks (2015) was exhibited as part of the WARM Guerrillas: Feminist Visions exhibition in Minneapolis’s (2016). Her Credit Crunch poster was acquired and shown in Victoria & Albert Museums touring exhibition, A World To Win: Posters of Protest & Revolution (2014-2016). More recently exhibiting in Vienna’s Fine Art Academy, in Dark Energy, Feminist Organizing, Working Collectively (2019) and collaborating with Help Refugees UK on a number of projects that have been exhibited in Somerset House and Saatchi Gallery (2019). More recently (2020) Aida worked on the international cross culture exhibition disCONNECT which was a collaborative project with Schoeni Projects and Hong Kong Walls creating a pandemic related immersive installation which was installed in London & Hong Kong.
Born in Shiraz, Iran, Peyman Heydarian ( ن یا ر یدح ن یپما ) is an award winning music scientist and santurist. A computer scientist and musicologist, he adopted innovative tuning systems and performance techniques to play a multi-ethnic repertoire on Iranian santur (Hammered Dulcimer), and developed computer algorithms for the analysis of Persian musical signals. Peyman began learning music at the age of 5 currently teaches santur and daf (Kurdish frame drum) and musical signal processing. Peyman has established and presided over a number of musical societies and bands, including Music Association of Iranian Students and the National Iranian Student Orchestra. He is a graduate of Shiraz University, Tarbiat Modarres University, London Metropolitan University, and Queen Mary, University of London. He has toured the world with a multi-ethnic programme “The Voice of Santur”, performing Persian, Kurdish, Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and Celtic (Scottish & Irish) music in concert halls, museums, universities, and festivals. Peyman has performed over a thousand concerts in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, Paris, Venice, Athens & Island of Hydra (Greece), Toronto & Niagara Falls (Canada), Hong Kong, and Auckland/Hamilton (New Zealand)
Aida Wilde is an Iranian born; London based printmaker/ visual artist and educator and the founder of Print Is Power & Sisters In Print projects. Her outdoor public art installations include, Honk Kong Walls 2019, Shangri-La, Glastonbury Festival, Wood Street Walls, Adblock Bristol, Croydon Rise Festival & various Brandalism projects. Aida’s fine art studio based serigraphy has been exhibited nationally & internationally. Her residency at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths, Empowered PrintWorks (2015) was exhibited as part of the WARM Guerrillas: Feminist Visions exhibition in Minneapolis’s (2016). Her Credit Crunch poster was acquired and shown in Victoria & Albert Museums touring exhibition, A World To Win: Posters of Protest & Revolution (2014-2016). More recently exhibiting in Vienna’s Fine Art Academy, in Dark Energy, Feminist Organizing, Working Collectively (2019) and collaborating with Help Refugees UK on a number of projects that have been exhibited in Somerset House and Saatchi Gallery (2019). More recently (2020)
Aida worked on the international cross culture exhibition disCONNECT which was a collaborative project with Schoeni Projects and Hong Kong Walls creating a pandemic related immersive installation which was installed in London & Hong Kong.
Join Exiled Writers Ink for 2025!
Thursday 13th February 6.30 to 8.45 pm
Free Event
Don’t Mess with the Sun:
Our Planet in Crisis
photo: Sudan by Sue Wallace-Shaddad
with
Shanta Acharya, Catherine Davidson, Gaby Sambucetti and
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Shanta Acharya was born in India. Her recent poetry collections are Dear Life (2025), What Survives Is The Singing (2020), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (2017) and Dreams That Spell The Light (2010). Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, appeared in 2001 and her novel, A World Elsewhere, in 2015. Her poems have been translated into several languages.
Catherine Davidson grew up in Los Angeles and lives in London. From a Greek and Jewish immigrant background, she has published poetry, nonfiction and fiction on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of critically acclaimed novel, The Priest Fainted. She teaches at Regent’s University and elsewhere.
Gaby Sambucetti Born in Argentina in 1986, her latest book is The Good, the Bad & the Poet (2020), and her reviews and other writing have appeared in magazines, anthologies and on literary platforms in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Bolivia, the US, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Bangladesh, India, and the UK. She is a teacher of Latin American and Spanish literature, and holds an MA in Modern Languages, Literature and Culture from King’s College London where she won the 2022 Cosmo Davenport- Hines poetry prize.
Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s poetry pamphlets are Once There was Colour (Palewell Press, 2024), Sleeping Under Clouds (Clayhanger Press, 2023), A City Waking Up (Dempsey and Windle, 2020). Once There was Colour focuses on the impact of the current crisis situation in Sudan and how it has affected the poet and her family. With poems widely published elsewhere, Sue writes poetry reviews, runs workshops, blogs for The Causley Trust and is Secretary of Suffolk Poetry Society.
Open Mic
Hosted by Jennifer Langer, poet and EWI founding director
Camden Art Centre
Finchley Road
Entrance on Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
April Exiled Lit Cafe
Wednesday 30th April 2025 at 7 pm
Our Narratives Our Territories
Artwork by Gisella Stapleton
We will be exploring who we are, how we manifest our struggles, from where and how far our writing traces our steps.
with
Silvia Quin Rothli
sberger – Jael de la Luz – Sofia Vaisman Maturana – Ana Maria Reyes Barrios – Ziba Karbassi
and
We welcome Joe Sedgwick, Head of Writing Services at The Literary Consultancy. He will talk about the Free Reads Scheme.
Silvia Quin Rothlisberger Colombian journalist, writer and broadcaster based in London. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri Magazine, The White Review, Songlines Magazine, The Guardian, among others. As a journalist Silvia has been telling the stories of the Latin American community in London for the past 14 years in print, radio and documentary. Her short stories have been published in anthologies for emerging writers by El Ojo de la Cultura and Comma Press. She currently works in the Guardian.
Jael de la Luz is a Mexican historian, writer, editor and community organiser. She is a founder and editor of Feminopraxis, a feminist online magazine. Founder of the Spanish Book Club at The Feminist Library, and involved in many writing and craft activism collectives. She was previously an academic writing a pioneering book about the contemporary religious landscape in Latin American, El Movimiento Pentecostal en México (2010). She founded Profana Press (2024). Her interests as a writer are in feminism, religious dissidence, motherhood, dreams and superstitions, conflict and oppression in experimental ways
Sofia Vaisman Maturana (Santiago, Chile, 1993). Poet and Doctor in Music Composition from King’s College London. Holds a diploma in Creative Writing from Universidad Diego Portales. In 2015, she published Pasillos de tiempos precoces (Planeta de Papel, Chile), a collection of poems about the transition to adolescence; and in 2018, No le pongamos nombre a lo nuestro (Puntos Suspensivos
Ediciones, Argentina), a poetry collection exploring her identity as a lesbian woman. She translated Judy Grahn’s A Woman is Talking to Death into Spanish (Editorial Monada, Argentina, 2024), and is about to publish Las Elegidas (Profana Press, London, 2025). She co-founded the women’s orchestra One Orchestra New in London, where she’s currently based. Much of her work as a composer focuses on setting poetry written by women to music.
Ana Maria Reyes Barrios (Caracas, Venezuela, 1983). She has published Sombras de la sal with Equidistancias (London-Buenos Aires) and her poetry has also appeared in various anthologies both in Venezuela and in the United Kingdom. The daughter of filmmakers and social activists, she grew up among books, old movie cans and combative songs that from a very young age led her to understand that poetry was her way of relating to the world. With an avid and passionate imagination, she liked to tell epic stories and incredible adventures. As an adult, after having studied arts and documentary film and having lived in different cities around the world, she became a traveller and a nomad, finding in freedom the purest source of inspiration. Since then, she has collected stories and tales that she writes in the form of narrative
and poetry. She practises writing and creation as anarchic rituals that keep her alive and bring her closer to the other inhabitants of this land.
Ziba Karbassi. Born in Tabriz, north western Iran, she wrote poems from an early age. Her first book in Persian was published in her early twenties and since then she has been published in over twelve books, not only in her mother tongue, but internationally. She has been translated into more than fifteen languages and is widely regarded as a leading poet living in exile. Her dense revolutionary lyrical and formatted lingual poetry achieves an intensity space and layers that is rare in contemporary poetry. In 1997 She introduced a subject to poetry called Breath poetry. She has performed her poems widely across Europe and America. She was chair of the Iranian Writers Association in exile from 2002 to 2004 and chair of Exiled Writers Ink from 2012 to 2014. She is currently an Exiled Writers Ink committee and editorial committee member.
Curated and hosted by Soraya Fernández DF
poet, fashion designer and EWI committee member
49 Great Ormond Street, London WC1N 3HZ
£4 for 2025 Exiled Writers Ink Members
£6 for others
Book by Eventbrite or Cash on the door
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/our-narratives-our-territories-tickets-1296668934689?aff=oddtdtcreator