Poetry in the House

Contact: shantaacharya@btinternet.com, 020 8341 7799

An evening of poetry with Bashabi Fraser, Lucy Hamilton, Emily Hinshelwood, Nancy Mattson, and Ann Pilling.

Bashabi Fraser is a poet, editor, children's writer, translator and critic, based in Edinburgh. Her recent publications include Ragas & Reels (2012), Scots Beneath the Banyan Tree (2012), From the Ganga to the Tay (an epic poem, 2009); Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter (2006; 2008), A Meeting of Two Minds: the Geddes Tagore Letters (2005) and Tartan & Turban (poetry collection, 2004). Bashabi is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University where she helped to establish the Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow based at the University of Dundee.

Lucy Hamilton was joint-recipient of the Poetry School Award 2006/7. She published a pamphlet, Sonnets for my Mother (Hearing Eye, 2009), of which ten poems have been published in Arabic. Selections of her translation from the French - about a legendary Algerian woman warrior-saint - have been published in Modern Poetry in Translation and in I am twenty people (Enitharmon). Her recent collection of prose poems, Stalker (Shearsman), was shortlisted for the 2012 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She co-judged the inaugural Cambridge University Benjamin Zephaniah Poetry Prize in 2011. Lucy co-edits the Long Poem Magazine and is working on her second collection.

Emily Hinshelwood's poetry has won several awards including the John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry. Her latest poetry collection On Becoming a Fish (Seren, 2012) charts her journey around the coast of Pembrokeshire. Her current project sees her walking through Wales asking everyone she meets Three Questions about Climate Change. After an early career as an anthropologist in the field of sustainable development for charities such as Oxfam and Actionaid, she moved to Wales in 1997, where she worked as a lecturer at Swansea University. She is currently a writer, performer and a community arts facilitator in south Wales.

Nancy Mattson moved from the Canadian prairies to London in 1990. She has published three full-length collections. Maria Breaks her Silence (Coteau, 1989) and Writing with Mercury (Flambard, 2006) explore memory, myth and history. Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead, 2012) begins with poems about early 20th century Russian women artists but moves to a search for her Finnish aunt who disappeared in Stalinist Russia. She is one of five poets in Shoestring's Take Five 06 and one of 20 writers in Finnish North American Literature in English (2009). She co-organises Poetry in the Crypt in Islington.

Ann Pilling published over 30 books for children, two novels and wrote the libretto for a children's musical. In 2005 she set aside fiction and turned to poetry full time. In May 2008, she won the Smith/Doorstop competition with Growing Pains and in November the same year Arrowhead Press published Home Field, her first collection. Her second, The Dancing Sailors, was published in 2011 by Indigo Dreams. Ann has won several prizes for her poems, and has been published widely in magazines. She lives in the Yorkshire Dales and is married with two sons and six grandchildren.

Poetry in the House is organised and hosted by Shanta Acharya.

Price: £5.00 / £3.00

Time: 8:00pm