EXILED LIT CAFE

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

Exiled Lit Cafe

Wednesday 22nd October 2025 at 7.15 pm

Across the Sovereign Lines:
Smuggling Words into Verses

An Exploration of Exile

with
Abbas Zahedi – Lester Gomez Medina –
Ziba Karbassi – Lucine Bassa – Tamsin Hopkins – Teresa Pilgrim

Poetry – Discussion – Audience collaborative poem

Abbas Zahedi is an artist and poet whose practice flows across sound, sculpture and social practice. First trained in medicine at UCL before completing an MA in Contemporary Photography at Central Saint Martins, he creates spaces where grief, resistance and joy breathe together. His works—presented at Tate Modern, CAPC (Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains) Bordeaux and Somerset House—interlace philosophy, poetics and social dynamics with performative approaches. Alongside exhibitions, Zahedi writes poetry that deepens an exploration of memory, loss and collective presence. Teaching at the Royal College of Art, he approaches art as a public service: an act of listening, witnessing and shared becoming.

Lucine Bassa The work of L U C I N E offers a window into the deepest corners of their mind and the human experience. A transdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician, they merge bold vocals, multisensory techniques, and language that moves between poetry, prose, and performance. Their practice creates alternate realities that challenge perception, provoke reflection, and creates spaces where people feel equal, human, and connected. With each project, L U C I N E holds space for authenticity, complexity, and curiosity, reminding us of the value of both the seen and the unseen, the intimate, and the infinite.

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 and layers that are 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.

Lester Gomez Medina was born in Nicaragua and raised in Costa Rica. He graduated in Spanish Philology studies which helped him develop a keen interest in short story and poetry writing. In 2014 Lester came to England where he currently lives. In 2018, he was awarded Third Prize in the Bart Wolffe poetry competition, organised by Exiled Writers Ink. In 2021, he was selected to work with poet Jane Duran, which resulted in the creation and publication of his first poetry collection: The Riddle Of The Cashew, published by Exiled Writers Ink. His poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies in collaboration with other fellow writers, in English and Spanish. He is one of the contributors to Home and Belonging, a pamphlet anthology of community-translated poems about migration, published by Palewell Press 2024. Lester’s writing depicts his experience migrating to two different countries, something that he conceives as a process of constant dialogue or integration with cultures, languages and nature.

Tamsin Hopkins writes fiction and poetry. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, London and runs regular poetry workshops for Exiled Writers Ink and Pens of the Earth. She is a member of Poets for the Planet and The Green Party. A previous winner of the Aesthetica Prize for Poetry, her work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies including Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-21. Her poems have been listed in a range of competitions including the Mslexia, Winchester and Bedford Prizes, The National Poetry Competition and The Gingko Prize. Her pamphlet Inside the Smile, and short fiction collection SHORE TO SHORE (River Stories) are published by Cinnamon Press. Once We Get Past Poker Night won the 23/24 Live Canon pamphlet competition.

Teresa Pilgrim is an academic, creative practitioner, activist and survivor. Their poetry and work responds to extreme forms of gender and identity based violence, especially sexual violence against girls, women and nonbinary people. Teresa uses their own lived experience of conversion ‘therapy’ and violence to combat anti-trans and anti-immigration ideologies, which share the same rhetoric of violence against women and girls that weaponize identities to cause and to legitimize their harms.