Welcome to the May Exiled Lit Cafe!

Thursday 16th May at 6.30 pm

Free event

Derick Armah is a researcher, poet and audio producer with an interest in telling compelling true-to-life stories that deal with the intimate connection between ‘person’ and ‘place’; the way that individuals are shaped by their physical, social, historical and cultural environments.

Dr Farah Didi is a poet, a former diplomat and a human rights defender from the Maldives. She has read her poems at a host of poetry events including as a guest poet at the Exile Lit Cafe. She is outspoken on human rights and democracy, which have informed the context of her poetry. She has served as the Maldives High Commissioner to the UK twice, the first time resigning in protest to the overthrow of the country’s first democratically elected government in 2012. Farah is the first Maldivian woman to get a PhD.

Afsaneh Gitiforouz British Iranian poet and novelist Afsaneh Gitiforouz has performed at a host of poetry venues. She is a published poet including by Radical Roots and recently in the anthology ’To Light The Trails’ in 2024. She was previously commissioned to lead the poetry section of ‘Age of Many Posts’ at the Barbican center in London in 2022.

Malu Halasa is a writer and literary editor of The Markaz Review. She has been published in The Guardian, Financial Times and TLS. Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women’s Protests in Iran (Saqi Books, 2023) is her third anthology that features essays, art and photography from Iran.

Shirin Razavian is a Tehran-born British poet whose work has appeared in Poetry London, Index on Censorship, Exiled Writers Magazine, The London Magazine, Agenda and Persian Book Review among others. She has published six Farsi and English poetry collections in the UK, the latest of which is Bird of Darkness, a selection of contemporary poems in Farsi. Shirin is the poetry editor of “World Cultural Heritage Voices” magazine (Savepasargad.com), an Exiled Ink magazine editorial committee member and a judge for the Jaleh Esfahani Cultural Foundation Poetry Prize. Some of her poems were recently translated to Czech and published in an anthology called “Before Infinity Ends”. Shirin’s poetry is also featured in an anthology by the United Nations Society of Writers called “Happiness-The Delight Tree”, in the USA in an anthology titled“The Poetry of Iranian Women” and the UK anthology “Silver throat of the moon”, titled after a verse from Shirin’s poem “Dying young”.

Music by Peyman (Fakhri) on flute and Shadi on daf

Hosted by Afsaneh Gitiforouz

Camden Art Centre
Drawing Studio (first floor)
Arkwright Road
London NW3 6DG
nearest stations: Finchley Road & Frognal Overground
and Finchley Road Underground