EXILED LIT CAFE

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

Tuesday 21st July

Exiled Lit Cafe at 7.00 pm
The Sekforde, 34 Sekforde Street
EC1R 0HA

Shared Humanity

As division deepens, as human suffering keeps multiplying under the yoke of war, persecution, and social-environmental collapse; we rebelliously survive, we remain human, we are reminded of our deepest truth: our shared experience.

Portrait of a Child: AD 150 to 200. Unknown artist/maker.

An evening of poetry, music and discussion with outstanding writers from around the globe plus guitar interlude and Open Mic

Hosted by poet: Xaviera Ringeling

Sudeep Sen Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Penguin), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), Anthropocene (Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize), Red and Rock. Edited landmark anthologies: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (UK), and Himalayas (UK). The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.

Denisse Vargas Bolanos is a Bolivian poet based in London. She is part of the feminist collective Hispano-American Women Writers on Memory (Las Juanas). Her poems and stories have appeared in Magma, Unravelling Memories, and anthologies showcasing Latin-American and exiled writers. Through her writing, she explores identity, otherness, connection, political action, and the complexities of being a Latin American immigrant woman

Merrie Joy Williams is a profoundly neurodivergent writer and tutor, who is an inaugural recipient of The Black Writers’ Guild’s Mary Prince Award. She has been longlisted or shortlisted for the National Poetry Competition, and The Bridport Prize, and is a winner and judge of the Poetry Archive’s ‘PAN’ competition. She is the recipient of a London Writers’ Award, Arts Council England Awards, and Obsidian and Hawthornden fellowships.

al-Sayegh was born in Iraq in 1955. His poetry denounces the devastation of wars and the horrors of dictatorship. He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman, and Beirut then took refuge in Sweden in 1996. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London. He has published fourteen books, including Uruk’s Anthem & The Dice Of The Text. He has received several international awards and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world. His bi-lingual collection is entitled Pages from the Biography of an Exile (Arc).

Stephen Watts is a poet, translator and editor. Among his own most recent books are Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014); and Republic Of Dogs / Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016). He has read his own work internationally, in Sibiu, Bucharest, Milan, Ravenna and Syria. He co-translated Adnan Al-Sayegh’s poetry collection Pages from the Diary of an Exile.

Piotr Kozak As a guitarist, he is primarily an improviser, drawing inspiration from folk, jazz and musical traditions from around the world.
He is an Anglo-Polish writer, translator, editor, poet and musician who has lived and worked extensively in Latin America and Europe. Based for nearly three decades in Chile before returning to the UK for family reasons, he writes on cultural, environmental and social issues, exploring themes of intercultural dialogue, human rights and migration. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, El Diario and Netflix.