MARCH 28-APRIL 15 2022
Sponsored by
After the huge success of last year’s festival, Indelible welcomes you again to enjoy the Indelible Festival of Literature 2022, a public virtual event hosting world renown poets, novelists, educators, literary agents, screenwriters, and playwrights who will share their work and ideas with a global audience. Our award-winning guests are from around the world, and the festival proudly features voices from the US, UK, Australia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Greece, the UAE, India, Ireland, the Philippines, Italy, and China. There’s a little bit of everything–for everyone–at the LitFest: our guests will be holding lectures, readings, workshops, and interactive conversations that touch upon a wide range of literary themes, connecting literature to other forms of art (such as music, food, and painting) and a various range of disciplines (education, science, medicine, psychology, history, diplomacy, and environmental studies).
All festival events are free to attend.
WEEK 1
Monday, March 28, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Young People’s poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye and Friends
“We are Living in a Poem: Poetry reading and workshop”
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How do we stay in touch with poems that surround us on a daily basis? How might those poems help us live better lives? Sharing simple lines that grew from modest roots and a few writing practices for keeping ourselves in tune! Bring notebook or paper and pen. See you there!
Bio: Naomi Shihab Nye is an American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poem at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People’s Poet Laureate.
Tuesday, March 29, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- André Naffis-Sahely (poet, translator, critic and editor)
“A reading from The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life”
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André Naffis-Sahely’s The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) revolves around portraits of our various promised lands scattered all over the planet, and chronicles the lives of those who go in search of them: labourers, travellers, dreamers; the hopeful and the dispossessed, with a particular emphasis on the Abu Dhabi of his childhood.
Bio: André Naffis-Sahely’s second collection, High Desert, will be published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2022. He is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. He has translated over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction. He is a Lecturer at University of California, Davis in the US and the editor of Poetry London in the UK.
Wednesday, March 30, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Raymond Khoury (screenwriter, novelist, NYT bestselling author)
- Sophie Boutros (screenwriter, movie director, producer)
“Raymond Khoury and Sophie Boutros in Conversation: Between the Screen and the Page”
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How does the film version of a narrative differ from the novel? Which one is more difficult? New York Times bestselling author and screenwriter Raymond Khoury will discuss the differences between two of the most popular forms of creative writing: writing novels vs. writing movie scripts.
Bios:
Raymond Khoury: Beirut-born London based Raymond Khoury is a screenwriter and novelist, best known as the author of the 2006 New York Times bestseller The Last Templar.
Upon his graduation as an architect, he returned to London, working in investment banking. It was through this unlikely career path that Khoury became interested in writing, as Khoury was introduced to a Wall Street investment banker who developed screenplays in his spare time. Taking an idea of his that the two jointly developed, Khoury wrote a screenplay which was a finalist for a Fulbright Fellowship in Screenwriting. His second writing attempt, a semi-autobiographical account of his college years in war-torn Lebanon was also shortlisted for the same award.
In 1996, Khoury optioned the rights to the Melvyn Bragg novel The Maid of Buttermere and wrote the screenplay adaptation of it. Robert De Niro soon announced to Variety that he would be producing the movie and playing the lead role. Khoury has also written for the BBC shows Spooks (known as MI:5 in the United States) and Waking the Dead.
Sophie Boutros: Sophie directed several TV shows in Future TV, Lebanon and Dubai TV, UAE. She also directed promotional videos and TV ads for high-end brands.
In 2003, Sophie started her career as a music video director with Julia Boutros’ hit “La B’ahlamak” and for 9 years she directed A-list Arab singers like Rashid El Majid, Nancy Ajram, Abdul Majid Abdallah, Nawal Kuweitye among others.
In 2013, Sophie started a new project. She co-wrote and directed her first feature film Mahbas (Solitaire); the award-winning film, was produced in summer 2015, premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival 2016 and was released in Lebanon, Syria, UAE, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait and Sweden in 2017. Making waves of success, Mahbas was watched by more than 130,000 viewers and toured the world in festivals.
Sophie had a major role in creating the Mohammed Bin Rashid School for Communication at AUD, where she has been working for 11 years. She enjoys movies, traveling and being around family and friends.
Thursday, March 31, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Maria Taylor (poet, critic, reviewer):
“Layering Identity”
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In this session the British Cypriot poet Maria Taylor will be exploring the shape-shifting nature of poetic identity, in poems where multiple identities often co-exist. The session will consist of a reading followed by a Q & A, including discussion on how poets balance their poetic identity with daily life.
Bio: Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet who lives in Leicestershire. Her poetry has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife, with Nine Arches Press. Her debut Melanchrini was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Her poems and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including The Rialto, Magma, The Guardian and The TLS. She is also a lecturer in Creative Writing.
Friday, April 1, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- “Poetry Across the Disciplines (music, medicine, food, psychology, ekphrasis, science, and technology)”
Poets: Chun Yu, Norbert Hirschhorn, Fouad M. Fouad, Hélène Demetriades, Fiona Sampson
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Poetry is an interdisciplinary art, as will be demonstrated by these poets, who will bridge the gap between art and science by sharing some verse inspired by science, music, psychology, and medicine.
Chun Yu, Ph.D.is an award-winning bilingual (English and Chinese) poet, graphic novelist, scientist, and translator. She is the author of a memoir in verse “Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution” (Simon & Schuster) winning multiple awards, and a historical graphic novel in progress (Macmillan), and more. Her poetry and stories have been published or are forthcoming in the Boston Herald, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Arion Press, MIT Tech Talk, Xinhua Daily, Poem of the Day (San Francisco Public Library), Heyday Books, and more. Her work is taught in world history and culture classes in the U.S. and internationally. Chun is an honoree of YBCA 100 award (2020) for creative changemakers. She has been awarded grants from San Francisco Arts Commission, Zellerbach, Poets & Writers, Sankofa Fund, and more. Chun holds a B.S. and M.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She was a post-doctoral fellow in a Harvard-MIT joint program.
Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero,” and proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. Dr. Hirschhorn is one of the inventors and developers of the life-saving oral rehydration therapy for people suffering fluid loss from cholera and other infectious diarrheal illnesses. It is estimated that his work has saved around 50 million people suffering from dehydration. After two decades abroad he now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has published six collections, the most recent a bilingual Arabic-English co-translation with Syrian physician-poet Fouad M. Fouad, Once Upon a Time in Aleppo, of the latter’s poems (Hippocrates Press). See his website, http://www.bertzpoet.com.
Dr. Fouad M. Fouad is a physician and poet from Aleppo. Following the outbreak of the war in Syria, he and his family moved to Lebanon where he is now at the American University of Beirut. Dr Fouad is deeply engaged in research and action on behalf of Syrian refugees. He has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic, the most recent being Once Upon a Time in Aleppo. Several of his poems have appeared in translation in English and French poetry journals.
Hélène Demetriades won the Hedgehog Press Full Fat Poetry Collection competition in 2020, and will have her debut collection ‘The Plumb Line’ published in Spring 2022. She has been published in numerous poetry magazines, anthologies and webzines. In 2021, she was highly commended in the International Poetry On The Lake competition, and shortlisted in the Wells Open Poetry competition. She was once an actor, but has now worked as a transpersonal psychotherapist for the last 25 years, and lives in South Devon with her husband and daughter.
Fiona Sampson is a leading British poet and writer, published in thirty-eight languages, who has received international awards in the US, India, Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the English Association and of the Wordsworth Trust, she’s published twenty-seven books and received an MBE for Services to Literature. She has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature and is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. Other honours include the Newdigate Prize, Cholmondeley Prize, Hawthornden Fellowship, and awards from the Arts Councils of England and of Wales, Society of Authors, Poetry Book Society and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as well as various Book of the Year selections. She’s also a broadcaster and newspaper critic, librettist and literary translator, and was editor of Poetry Review 2005-12. Her internationally acclaimed In Search of Mary Shelley was shortlisted for the Biographers Club Slightly Foxed Prize. She recently received two major European prizes, the 2019 Naim Frashëri Laureateship of Albania and Macedonia, and the 2020 European Lyric Atlas Prize, Bosnia. Two Way Mirror, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was published in 2021. She is Emeritus Professor of Poetry, Roehampton University.
Lorette C. Luzajic: is a Toronto based writer who studied journalism but loves poetry and small fictions. Her work has been published widely and internationally, and nominated several times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She recently won first place in a flash fiction contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. Her work has been translated into Urdu. Her most recent book Pretty Time Machine is a collection of ekphrastic prose poems. Lorette is also the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to writing inspired by art. She is also an award-winning visual artist whose collage paintings have been collected in over 25 countries. Visit her at www.mixedupmedia.ca.
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WEEK 2
Monday, April 4, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
Eco-poetics panel, featuring:
Ruth Padel, FRSL, ZSL (Poet, novelist, non-fiction writer)
Abhay K. (poet-diplomat, composer of “Earth Anthem”)
“The Fragile Earth”
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Both poets, Ruth Padel and Abhay K., have been passionately engaged with environmental concerns for over a decade. They will read poems concerned with wildlife, climate, and the vulnerable state of nature today, as our planet faces triple threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental pollution.
Bios:
Ruth Padel is an award-winning British poet with close links to Greece, science, classical music and wildlife conservation, especially in India. She has published twelve poetry collections shortlisted for all major UK prizes, most recently Beethoven Variations and We are All from Somewhere Else, on migration; and two novels – most recently Daughters of the Labyrinth, set on the island of Crete where she has had close connections all her life. Her non-fiction includes books on reading poetry drawn from her newspaper column The Sunday Poem, a study of rock music and Greek myth, a memoir focussing on wild tiger conservation, and books on Greek tragedy. She is Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, and Fellow of both the Zoological Society of London and Royal Society of Literature. Awards include First Prize in the National Poetry Competition, a British Council Darwin Now Award, and a Cholmondley Prize.
Abhay K. is the author of ten poetry collections including Monsoon (Sahitya Akademi, 2022) The Magic of Madagascar (L’Harmattan Paris, 2021), The Alphabets of Latin America(Bloomsbury India, 2020), and the editor of The Book of Bihari Literature (Harper Collins, 2022), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems, CAPITALS, New Brazilian Poems and The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems. His poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines including Poetry Salzburg Review, Asia Literary Review among others. His ‘Earth Anthem’ has been translated into over 150 languages. He received SAARC Literary Award 2013 and was invited to record his poems at the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 2018.His translations of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta (Bloomsbury India, 2021) and Ritusamhara (Bloomsbury India, 2021) from Sanskrit, have won KLF Poetry Book of the Year Award 2020-21.
Tuesday, April 5, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Antonia Taylor (PR, Creative Business Communication Expert, Writer)
“Building your Author Brand”
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In this session, we’ll explore how to overcome resistance to, and learn to love, building your personal brand as a writer. By tapping into connection, intention and your purpose, you’ll get clarity on how your personal brand ultimately serves your writing and audience to: Create a powerful narrative around your work, leverage your presence on social media, and build your community authentically
Bio: Antonia Taylor is a British Cypriot writer, poet and communications expert. She lives in Reading and is working on her first collection.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Romalyn Ante (poet, author, nurse practitioner, psychotherapist)
“Antiemetic for Homesickness: Bridging two different worlds”—Reading and Workshop
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Romalyn Ante will read from her highly-acclaimed poetry collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus) and discuss personal and political poems that illuminate the life of Filipino migrant nurses in the United Kingdom such as her mother. In this event, we will scrutinize what it means to be displaced, to care and sacrifice, and honour the home we carry with us.
Bio: Romalyn Ante is a Filipino-British, Wolverhampton-based author. She is co-founding editor of harana poetry, a magazine for poets who write in English as a second or parallel language, and founder of Tsaá with Roma, an online interview series with poets and other creatives. Her debut collection is Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus). She was recently awarded the Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship 2021/22.
Romalyn is a Poetry Ambassadors 2021 mentor. Her honours include the Poetry London Prize, Manchester Poetry Prize, Society of Author’s Foundation Award, Developing Your Creative Practice, Creative Future Literary Award, amongst others. Her debut pamphlet, Rice & Rain (V Press), received the 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet.
Her work has been featured in BBC World News, World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio3, The Verb, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue UK, Southbank Center, Book Week Scotland, Birmingham Literature Festival, and Verve Poetry Festival. She has also run a number of poetry workshops including those for The Poetry School, Royal College of Nursing, UniSlam, and Writing West Midlands.
Apart from being a writer, she also works full-time as a nurse practitioner, specializing in providing different psychotherapeutic treatments.
Thursday, April 7, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Anthony Anaxagorou (poet, writer, publisher)
“Writing History: Heritage Aesthetics and the Poetics of Empire, Diaspora and Sons”
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Award-winning poet Anthony Anaxagorou reads from his forthcoming poetry collection, Heritage Aesthetics, a history in verse that takes on colonial literatures and examines their impact on people of diaspora and their construction of identity
Bio: Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His poetry has been published in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry London, New Statesman, Granta, and elsewhere. His work has also appeared on BBC Newsnight, BBC Radio 4, ITV, Vice UK, Channel 4 and Sky Arts. His second collection After the Formalities published with Penned in the Margins is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S Eliot Prize along with the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. It was also a Telegraph and Guardian poetry book of the year. In 2020 he published How To Write It with Merky Books; a practical guide fused with tips and memoir looking at the politics of writing as well as the craft of poetry and fiction along with the wider publishing industry. He was awarded the 2019 H-100 Award for writing and publishing, and the 2015 Groucho Maverick Award for his poetry and fiction. In 2019 he was made an honorary fellow of the University of Roehampton. Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press.
His forthcoming poetry collection Heritage Aesthetics will be published by Granta in 2022.
Friday, April 8, 2022 (1:00 pm Dubai, 10:00 am UK):
- Zuzana (Zac) Zachar (Montessori trainer, storyteller)
“The Art of Storytelling in Montessori Education”
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Zuzana Zachar, aka “Zac”, will explain the vital role of literature—specifically storytelling—in the early learning years, particularly from a Montessori perspective. Zac will discuss some of her favorite storytelling methods and their impact on children.
Bio: Zac is a hands-on Montessori educator, conscious full time in-the-classroom teaching involvement for 40 years, from infants to adult learners, 37 years in Montessori Education. She is a member of the American Montessori Society(AMS) trained for Montessori 3-6 years(primary) and 6-9 years(lower elementary). Experience in United States as a trainer for several AMS training centres and presenter at AMS conferences. More recently, Zac has done Montessori training in Hangzhou and Beijing, China and is currently working with Montessori Academy group, Australia, to facilitate the training of early childhood educators in the Montessori method as they work to provide the Montessori experience to as broad a population as possible.
Friday, April 8, 2022: “Poetry and the Diaspora” (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
Various poets: André Naffis-Sahely, Anthony Anaxagorou, Antonia Taylor, Maria Taylor, Omar Sabbagh, Roula-Maria Dib, Kostya Tsolakis
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What and where is home? How do we carry our heritage within and how does it shape who we are? Let the poetry answer.
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WEEK 3
Monday, April 11, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Sabrina Mahfouz (writer, spoken-word poet, playwright, radio presenter)
“These Bodies of Water: Notes on the British Empire, the Middle East and Where We Meet – Reading and Q&A with Sabrina Mahfouz”–Reading and Workshop
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Sabrina Mahfouz reads from her new book (out 10 May 2022, Tinder Press), which combines literary styles, including memoir and fiction to examine British colonialism in the Middle East from a unique perspective.
Bio: Sabrina Mahfouz is a writer and performer, raised in London and Cairo. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) and resident writer at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Her most recent theatre show was A History of Water in the Middle East (Royal Court) and her most recent publications as editor include Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making it Happen (Saqi) and Poems From a Green and Blue Planet (Hachette Children’s). Sabrina’s published and produced theatre work includes Chef, a Fringe First Award winner; Dry Ice, for which she was nominated in The Stage Awards for Acting Excellence; With a Little Bit of Luck, which won Best Drama Production in the BBC Radio & Music Awards 2019; Clean, a Herald Angel Award winner which transferred to New York and she recently adapted Malorie Blackman’s celebrated YA novel Noughts & Crosses for Pilot Theatre. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa (based on the book by Diane Hofmeyr and Jane Ray, for Omnibus Theatre and Little Angel Theatre) won a 2018 Off West End Award. Her poetry collection, How You Might Know Me (Out-Spoken Press), was a 2017 Guardian Best Summer Read and she was an essay contributor to the award-winning anthology The Good Immigrant (Unbound). Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (Saqi), a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year, a London’s Big Read finalist and selected by Emma Watson for her feminist book club, Our Shared Shelf. She’s a regular on BBC Radio 4 recently presenting Word of Mouth, Poetry Please and writing fiction for Short Works.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
“Depth poetry and Alchemical Poetics”, poetry reading + workshop, featuring:
Adam Wyeth (poet, playwright, essayist)
Roula-Maria Dib (poet, editor, literary/depth psychology scholar)
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Adam Wyeth is an award-winning and critically acclaimed poet, playwright and essayist with five books published with Salmon Poetry. In 2019 he received The Kavanagh Fellowship Award. Wyeth is the author of Silent Music, Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prize and The Art of Dying, an Irish Times Book of the Year. In 2013 Salmon published his essays, The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry. This book is used as a teaching tool around the world and been officially added to two De Paul University classes in Chicago – Books for Celtic Mythology and Books for Contemporary Celtic Literature. Wyeth’s plays have been performed across Ireland and also in New York and Berlin. His play This Is What Happened was published by Salmon in 2019. His fifth collection about:blank is a large four-part poetical sequence, which blurs genre, moving across, poetry, prose and dialogue. In 2020, Wyeth was selected for The Abbey Theatre’s (Ireland’s National Theatre) Engine Room Development Programme where he worked on about:blank as an audio-immersive piece. Subsequently, he received the Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award to complete the project. about:blank premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival 2021. Wyeth is also a recipient of the Live Music & Performance Scheme for a new music and text work in collaboration with Emmy-nominated composer David Downes, performed by pianist Rolf Hind and Cellist Adrian Mantu. Wyeth is an Associate Artist of the Civic Theatre, Dublin, and works on ideas and research for the RTÉ Poetry Programme. He teaches online creative writing correspondence courses at adamwyeth.com and Fishpublishing.com. Adam has developed a unique and accessible series of talks and creative writing workshops called The Mythic Imagination for participants of all writing levels.
Roula-Maria Dib (PhD, University of Leeds) is an award-winning literary scholar, poet, and editor whose research interests include literature, creative writing, and Jungian psychology. She is the winner of the British Council’s Alumni Awards 2021-2022 for the Culture and Creativity category in the UAE and a recipient of the AUD Provost’s Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement 2020; her book, Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2020) was shortlisted as a finalist for the IAJS (International Association for Jungian Studies) book awards, and some poems from her collection, Simply Being (Chiron Press, 2021) have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Roula-Maria is also the founding editor of literary and arts journal, Indelible, and creative producer of literary event series, Indelible Evenings, as well as Psychreative, a virtual salon for researchers, artists, and writers with a background in Jungian psychology. Her MOOC, “Why Online Creative Communities Matter”, is featured on Academia.edu. She is currently a professor of English at the American University in Dubai and member of The Poetry Society, the Royal Society of Literature, the British Association for Modernist Studies, the International Association for Jungian Studies, and the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Mona Arshi (poet, novelist)
“Forms for Silence”
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Mona Arshi talks about what a poem can hold and the reasons she’s travelled between prose and poetry.She will read both from her two books of poetry and her recently published novel Somebody Loves You.
Bio: Mona Arshi worked as a Human rights lawyer at Liberty before she started writing poetry. She worked on a number of high-profile legal cases including the Stephen Lawrence case, representing Janet Alder and Diane Pretty, she also represented women fleeing violence in homes as well as refugees whilst in private practice. She completed her Masters in poetry in 2011 at the University of East Anglia with a distinction. Her debut collection ‘Small Hands’ won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015. She has also been a prizewinner in the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester creative writing competitions. Mona has curated poetry events at the House of Commons with EVAW (End Violence Against Women) on International Woman’s Day and co-edited a special issue of POEM magazine on the theme of BREXIT in June 2017. Mona makes regular appearances on the radio including Front Row and was commissioned to write a programme on the Odyssey for ‘Book of the week’ for Radio 4, which was broadcast in March 2017. Her poems and interviews have been published in many magazines but also in the Times, The Guardian, Granta and The Times of India as well as on the London Underground. Mona has collaborated with dancers (‘Dancing Words’), musicians (Vidal Montgomery) and fashion (JIGSAW and Gallery Unconfined). She has read at various festivals as well as the BFI, Southbank, British Museum, Mansion House and galleries throughout the UK. Mona works as a tutor for the Arvon Foundation and The Poetry School. Mona has judged the National Poetry Competition, The Forward Prize and is on the judging panel for the TS Eliot awards in 2020.
Thursday, April 14, 2022 (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
- Modern adaptations of Shakespeare, a panel featuring:
Patricia Finney (author, journalist)
Sarah Smith (NYT bestselling novelist)
In conversation with Alan Hickman
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William Shakespeare, playwright and poet, is a known, even a marketable quantity. His face is familiar to us from “portraits” such as the Stratford bust and the Droeshout engraving that adorns the Folio. Yet he is also a mystery. Entire years are missing from his biography. The question remains, how did a humble glover’s son, who never completed grammar school, come to rule the London stage and be known as the greatest poet in the English language? The mysteries persist, but an intrepid cadre of writers is working to fill the lacunae in Shakespeare’s life in their painstakingly researched works of fiction. Two of those novelists, Sarah and Smith and Patricia Finney are with us today, discussing the modern role of Shakespeare in 21st century Elizabethan novels.
Bios:
Sarah Smith: Internationally bestselling author Sarah Smith’s novels are published in 14 languages. Samuel Delany has called her Chasing Shakespeares “the best novel about the Bard since Nothing Like the Sun.” Her most recent book, Crimes and Survivors, is a multicultural version of the Titanic story. She received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, studied in London, and lives near Boston, Mass.
Patricia Finney: Since her first book was published at the age of 18, she has sampled a rich variety of respectable and disreputable jobs, including Fleet Street hack, editor of a GU medical journal, office cleaner, teacher of English as a second language.
She has now worked out that she’s bored by anything except writing, singing and martial arts. Her books include the SIR ROBERT CAREY series of Elizabethan crime novels (under the pen name P F Chisholm), which she is going to republish, the ENYS 16th century detective novels, and various bits and bobs like LUCKY WOMAN, a contemporary romantic thriller (currently on Kindle Unlimited). Oh and the ELIZABETHAN NOIR TRILOGY, available on Amazon and as a print book.
Go to http://www.patriciafinney.com for more about her books, find her on Facebook and Twitter and admire her latest ventures as a poetry-monger on Terrible Daily Poems – patriciafinney2.substack.com and Booktok (#writerpatriciafinney).
Friday, April 15, 2022: Grand finale (7:00 pm Dubai, 4:00 pm UK, 11:00 am EST):
Editors’ Chat: featuring Roisin Ni Neachtain (Crow of Minerva), Kostya Tsolakis (Harana Poetry), André Naffis-Sahely (Poetry London), and Roula-Maria Dib (Indelible)
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Literary journal editors join in a round table discussion about a day in an editor’s life and will touch upon the following points: how to get your work published, cultivating a creative community, challenges and pet peeves, what readers and contributors should know, the “science” behind acceptances, rejections, other behind-the-scenes moments. The audience will have the chance to ask the editors some questions too!