Treasuring Your Word Hoard

Online workshop with Liz Berry

Tuesday 10th October

6.30 - 8.30pm

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Hinny, goosegog, ginnel, clarty - the music of vernacular language can make your poems sing! Join award-winning poet Liz Berry for a friendly, playful workshop exploring how to use dialect, vernacular and home language words in your poetry. You’ll read some wonderful contemporary poems and take part in short, lively writing exercises designed to spark new work.

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Liz Berry is an award winning poet and author of the collections Black Country (Chatto, 2014); The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto 2018); The Dereliction (Hercules, 2021), a collaboration with artist Tom Hicks; and most recently The Home Child (Chatto, 2023), a novel in verse. Her poems, rooted in the landscape and language of her native Black Country, have received the Somerset Maugham Award, Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and Forward Prizes.

Suitable for: writers of all stages

Duration: 2hrs

Format: online

Cornish Modern Poetries

Aaron Kent, Ella Frears, Taran Spalding-Jenkin

Wednesday 11th October 

6.30 - 8pm

Broken Sleep’s groundbreaking 2022 anthology Cornish Modern Poetries shone a light on the thriving Cornish poetry scene, and featured poems in both English and Kernewek. Join us to hear some of the best contemporary Cornish poetry, as well as to discuss how Cornwall’s unique language and landscape impact upon its literature.

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Aaron Kent is a working-class writer, publisher, and insomniac from Cornwall. His poetry has been translated into Latvian, French, Persian, and Kernewek (Cornish). His upcoming collection, The Working Classiv, is out in December with the87press. Aaron was awarded the Awen medal from the Bards of Cornwall for his poetry pamphlet The Last Hundred, then suffered a brain hemorrhage a few months later. Coincidence? Probably.

Ella Frears’ collection Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books, 2020) was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her most recent publication is I AM THE MOTHER CAT, out with Rough Trade Books. Ella hosts chat & music show Tears for Frears on Soho Radio.

Taran Spalding-Jenkin is a poet, performer, and translator with a background in drama and folk tradition. Their work explores the spaces between identities, disability, queerness, and hireth – the longing for a lost home or one which has never existed. Taran was Kernewek consultant for Cornish Modern Poetries, and has won awards from Gorsedh Kernow for poetry and for BBC radio project A Shanty For Cornish Youth. His debut pamphlet Health Hireth was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2023.

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Suitable for: all

Duration: 1.5hrs

Format: online

Access: subtitles provided

Out Of Sri Lanka

Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, S Niroshini, Samodh Porawagamage

Thursday 12th October

6.30 - 8pm

To celebrate the new Bloodaxe anthology of Sri Lankan and diasporic poetry, Out of Sri Lanka - a PBS Special Commendation – we are thrilled to welcome all three editors and two of the poets to this panel. Join them to share, celebrate and discuss this rich and vital literature, and the importance of memory – from the preservation of folk practises to the poetry of witness.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils and now teaches at Harvard. He is the author of The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here, a book of sonnets for his wife, which won a Northern Writers Award and was a PBS Recommendation. He also won Poetry magazine's Editor's Prize for Reviewing, and helps organize Ledbury Critics, which aims to increase racial diversity in review-culture.

Shash Trevett is a poet and a translator of Tamil poetry into English. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies and is a winner of a Northern Writers’ Award. Her pamphlet From a Borrowed Land was published in May 2021 (Smith|Doorstop) and her first collection is forthcoming from Smith|Doorstop in 2024. Shash has been a judge for the PEN Translates awards and was a Visible Communities Translator in Residence at the National Centre for Writing. She is a member of the Kinara Poetry Collective, is a Ledbury Critic and a Board Member of Modern Poetry in Translation.

Seni Seneviratne, a writer of English and Sri Lankan heritage, is published by Peepal Tree Press - Wild Cinnamon and Winter Skin (2007), The Heart of It (2012), Unknown Soldier (2019). Unknown Soldier was a PBS Recommendation, National Poetry Day Choice and highly commended in Forward Poetry Prizes 2020. She is widely published in anthologies and magazines. She is currently working on an Arts Council Funded touring project based on her book, Unknown Soldier; an LGBTQ project with Sheffield Museums entitled Queering the Archive and completing her fourth collection, The Go-Away Bird, to be published in October 2023.

S. Niroshini (she/ her) is a writer based in London. Her poetry, fiction and essays centre stories of girlhood, trauma and the histories of Tamil women, exploring expressions of interiority, freedom and desire. Her poetry pamphlet Darling Girl was published by Bad Betty Press in 2021.

Samodh Porawagamage is from I.D.H., Sri Lanka. He writes about the 2004 Tsunami, Sri Lankan Civil War, poverty, and colonialism. His poems have appeared in Annasi & Kadalagotu, Mantis, Stoneboat, etc. He has a Ph.D. in disaster poetics from Texas Tech University, where he currently teaches. He's attracted to grumpy cats despite being bitten or scratched over three dozen times.

Suitable for: all

Duration: 1.5hrs

Format: online

Access: subtitles provided