EXILED LIT CAFE

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

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 Rothlisberger – 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.