EXILED LIT CAFE

Every month hear some fantastic exiled writers and musicians and there is an Open Mic session too.

Exiled Lit Cafe

Tuesday 18th November 2025 at 7 pm

Freedom!
Unbinding the Tongue Towards Freedom

Poetry – Discussion – Audience collaborative poem
with
Liu Hongbin – Amir Darwish – Leo Boix – Mona Dash – Tamara Wilson – Lee Campbell

Liu Hongbin was born in Tsingtao, northern China in 1962. He was active in the democracy movement of the 1980s but after involvement in the events following Tiananmen in 1989, he had to go into exile and has since lived mainly in Britain with one return to China which led to a further expulsion. A student of English in his native land, he has continued to compose poems in his own language and has actively promoted contemporary Chinese literature in the West. Poetry has always been his chief love. His work not only includes poetry, but also criticism, short stories and translation of western poetry into Chinese. His publications are A Day within Days (Ambit, 2006) and Tie huan (London, 1992).

Amir Darwish is a British Syrian poet and writer of Kurdish origin who lives in London. Born in Aleppo in 1979, he came to Britain as an asylum seeker in 2003. Amir’s two collections of poetry are Dear Refugee (Smokestack, 2019) and Don’t Forget the Couscous (Smokestack, 2015).Amir’s work has been published and anthologised worldwide. His poetry has been translated into Arabic, Bengali, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish, amongst other languages. He has taken part in several radio programmes, including BBC 4, BBC World Service and Refugee Radio. He has presented his poetry at literary and poetry festivals worldwide, including Finland, India, Italy, Turkey, Morocco and Estonia. He is currently a poetry editor at the Other Side of Hope literary magazine

Leo Boix is a bilingual Latinx poet, born in Argentina and based in London, whose work spans continents, languages, and identities. His debut English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and named one of The Guardian’s top five poetry books of the year. His second collection, Southernmost: Sonnets (Chatto & Windus, 2025), was shortlisted for the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Boix is the editor and lead translator of the groundbreaking Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Poetry (Fourteen Publishing), and has introduced English-speaking audiences to major Latin American voices. A fellow of The Complete Works program, he co-directs Un Nuevo Sol, nurturing Latinx writers in the UK. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, Kew Gardens, and the National Poetry Library, earning prizes including the Bart Wolffe Exiled Writers Ink Poetry Prize, the Keats-Shelley Prize, and a PEN Award.

Mona Dash is an award- winning author born and brought up in India and now based in London. Her work includes her memoir A Roll of the Dice, a short story collection Let Us Look Elsewhere , a novel Untamed Heart and three collections of poetry, A Certain Way, Dawn Drops and Map of the Self (Linen Press UK). She has been published in various journals and listed in leading competitions. Her work has been presented on BBC Radio 4, included in Best British Short Stories 22, and published in more than thirty-five anthologies. She also works as a business leader in AI, for a global tech company.

Dr Tamara Wilson is an award-winning poet, literary activist and academic whose essays, poems and translations have featured in national and international publications. As the granddaughter of Armenian and Pontic Greek orphans, she worked with diverse migrant and refugee groups both as an ESOL lecturer, charity worker and currently, as the chair of EWI. A devout defender of women and minority rights, she collaborated with several NGOs, charities, community centres, and research institutions against the employment of hate speech and discriminatory discourses as a performance of patriotism.

Dr Lee Campbell is an artist, poet, filmmaker, co-curator of POW! Play on Words and Senior Lecturer at University of the Arts London. His debut poetry collection is See Me: An (Almost) Autobiography (London Poetry Books, 2024). His poems have been published in a range of literary magazines and his chapbook Queering the Landscape was shortlisted for the 2024 Broken Spine Chapbook Poetry Competition. This year, he has headlined at many established poetry platforms. His experimental performance poetry films have been selected for many international film festivals and prizes.