Monday 7th October 2019 at 7:00 pm

Opening lands:

An evening of poetry, prose and creative partnerships
Hosted by Catherine Davidson and Abbas Faiz

Part I: Book Launches
We are delighted to feature readings from three upcoming books that feature creative partnerships and bridges across time and culture.

Ziba Karbassi reads from Lemon Sun

Ziba Karbassi was born in Tabriz, north-western Iran, and left in the late 1980’s as a young teenager. Since then she has lived in London. She’s published ten books of poetry in Persian and two books in English and Italian and is widely regarded as the most accomplished Persian poet of her generation. She has been translated in more than ten languages, and has read and performed widely across the US, UK and Europe. She was chosen by Birkbeck as a revolutionary world poet. Lemon Sun is her latest collection, to be published by Arc.

Marta Dziurosz reads from Renia’s Diary

Marta Dziurosz is a Polish to English literary translator, interpreter and literary curator; she was a Free Word Centre Translator in Residence, and works for Pan Macmillan and is a member of the Translators Association committee. Her writing and translations have appeared in the New Statesman, PEN Atlas, Words Without Borders and In Other Words, among others. Along with Anna Blasiak (whose poems appear in EWI’s e-mag) she has translated the diary of Renia Spiegel, a young Jewish Polish poet who wrote on the eve of the Second World War and before her death at 18.

Seni Seneviratne reads from her new collection, Unknown Soldier

Seni Seneviratne was born and raised in Leeds, and is of English and Sri Lankan heritage. Unknown Soldier is her third collection with Peepal Tree Press. A frequent creative partner in other mediums such as film, music and digital arts, she is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in Brisitish Poetry and is currently one of ten commissioned writers on the Colonial Countryside Project National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. www.seniseneviratne.com

Stephen Duncan reads from Beata Duncan’s Breaking Glass.

Stephen Duncan is a poet and sculptor, whose Ghost Walking was a Book&Pamphlet competition winner with Smith/Doorstop Books. He has won Bridport, Arvon, Cardiff and Greenwich Competition prizes, is a Hawhornden Fellow and participated in the 2019 EWI Open Lands Workshops. He will be reading from Breaking Glass, a new collection of his late mother’s work, published by WriteSideLeft Press.

Part II: Open Lands Workshop: Discussion and Reading

This summer saw the launch of the ongoing Towards an Open Land project, a series of workshops in London and on the road that invite writers from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds to explore identity and creativity in an era of increasing Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism. The workshops were hosted by writers Shamim Azad and Ariel Khan, and this event will be a chance to hear the results of the first round of collaborations. This is a chance to hear more about this important new initiative, including the framework created by the poets, and some of the new work developed.

Readers: Shamim Azad, Mark Collins, Justin Hoffman, Anba Jawi, Hasan Kahya and Jennifer Langer.

Shamim Azad is on the board of Exiled Writers ink. She is a British bilingual story-teller, poet and educator of Bangladeshi origins.

Mark Collins’ great grandparents were exiled from Russia/Poland in the 1880’s. A lawyer, he explores his diaspora roots in his poetry.

Hasan Kahya left Cyprus in 1972; he’s translated poet Fikret Demirag and his own poems can be found in Two Rivers (Arkin University, 2018).

Dr. Jennifer Langer is the founding director of Exiled Writers Ink. She has edited four anthologies of exiled literature.

Justin Hoffman is a freelance interpreter of Russian and French with a strong connection to his Yiddish and Russian-speaking ancestral roots.

Dr. Anba Jawi moved to the UK from Iraq where she was a pioneering geologist. She writes poetry and fiction; her work appears in the Free Reads Anthology (2019).

Plus: Open Mike

If you have a poem you’d like to add to the evening, we would love to hear from you.