News

Inspired by Exyzt’s The Feasting Mouth, a communal oven and dining table, I will be in residence at Skirt of the Black Mouth, Southern Landscape Tate Modern, Sumner Street: 15-17 July & 11-15 August 2014. Continue reading →

I’m really pleased to have an essay (about Dartmouth Park Hill and the idea of being half way up, half way down an urban hill) included in Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City, published by the brilliant Penned In the Margins.

Alongside fabulous writers Aoife Mannix, Yemisi Blake and Joseph Coelho, I will be reflecting on All Change’s In Between project 2009-2012– an innovative programme, which aimed to deliver high quality community-based writing residencies in North London – with young people, street-traders at Whitecross Street Market, and a Turkish-speaking women’s group – and to critically evaluate their impact. We will be reading from 4 unique publications and discussing the project at Fix Coffee, 161 Whitecross Street, Shoreditch, London, Monday 13 May 2014, 6-8pm.

My London Story is an app and website that geo-locates non-fiction, long-form stories about the city.

They publish 10 original stories every two months and illustrate each with original photography. The idea is that, over time, they’ll build a unique portrait of London through quality, experiential writing.

I have a piece included in the first ‘edition’. Down The Elephant was written as part of Home From Home, a collaboration with photographer Eva Sajovic, exploring Elephant and Castle in South London through portraits and stories.

I was honoured to be asked to sit on the judging panel for this year’s New Media Writing Prize, run by Bournemouth University and If:Book. We had a great shortlist of seven pieces, and chose Window by Katharine Norman as the winner. Window is a beautiful, contemplative piece, dedicated to the memory of John Cage, which explores the nature of sound, time and place; I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in Creative Intersections this year. Creative Intersections is a pilot project within King’s Cultural Institute’s Creative Futures programme, curated by The Royal Society of Arts (RSA), that partners artists with academics from different departments within Kings College London.  This project focuses upon what is needed to enable small organisations or individuals to engage with higher education – but also what creates connections across often diverse academic disciplines.

My group explored how we experience and articulate place (See Group 3 at: https://creativeintersections.wordpress.com/what-have-we-been-doing/). It has been a fascinating and delightful process, and there’s a wealth of information about the project and the wider context on the project blog: https://creativeintersections.wordpress.com/.

credit: Rafau Sieraczek

Earlier this year I was commissioned to write a ‘briefing’ about writing residencies by NAWE, Poetry Ireland, Scottish Book Trust and Literature Wales.

The briefing is aimed at writers new to writing residencies and has bags of practical advice on how to get started, as well as five case studies of work by Andy Croft, Jay Bernard, Liz Weir, Patrick Jones and Liz Niven.

The resource is free to download from NAWE’s website.