By Catherine T Davidson Reflections on EWI’s Second Agit Lit event On February 5, I hosted an event at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden on behalf of Exiled Writers Ink, London’s longstanding umbrella organisation for refugee and immigrant poets and writers. It was our second “Agit Lit” event — where we combine an evening of poetry [...]
Last night, I introduced the readers at my first ever hosting of the Exiled Lit Café by talking about what we do in small rooms and why it matters. We were in the Betsey Trotwood pub (named for the irrepressible character in David Copperfield) in Farringdon, a London neighbourhood where old and new mingle with [...]
Some time ago I visited a part of the world that I once could loosely call ‘my country’. What was once one country is now seven. If this sounds like a riddle - it is. I use the word ‘loosely’ retrospectively because some people like me; rightly or wrongly, once regarded that part of the [...]
This is not about Delphi the supernatural oracle, as it happens it's about a natural man/poet. And for that matter not in Greek but in Persian. And as the story goes: on a December evening in Abadan, five plain clothes officers arrive at the Delphi's family home with a search and arrest warrant for Raaouf [...]
Exiled Lit Cafe 9th January 2017 Hypnos is the God of Sleep and Morpheus, the God of Dreams. Beds are the theatres in which the nightly drama of our dreams plays out and so they can be a place of danger. Despite the tube strike and unrelenting rain, our guests, Adnan Al Sayegh, Stephen Watts, [...]
I gasp at my first sight of the so-called ‘Jungle’ camp which is of a sprawl of never-ending tents and of groups of young men walking aimlessly in squalid conditions. The 6,000 predominantly young male migrants originate from Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan and Eritrea with a few from Somalia. They have fled from horrific situations in [...]
