Seren First Thursday December | Hybrid | Chapter, Cardiff & Online

Join us in person and online for the last First Thursday of 2022. This month we once again return to Chapter Arts Centre where we'll be joined by guest readers Christopher Meredith and Mari Ellis Dunning.

When: Thursday 1st December
Where: Media Point, 1st Floor, Chapter Arts Centre & via Facebook Live
Time: 7:30pm GMT
Tickets: £3 on the door

As usual, our guest readers will read in the first half, after which the floor will be opened to attendees for our popular open mic. Those not able to attend in person can watch the main readings here via Facebook live https://www.facebook.com/events/3290945654450920/.

In a change to our hybrid format, we will no longer be streaming the open mic. This is to preserve the open mic as a space where readers can road test new material prior to publication. We hope our online audience can understand why we have taken this decision.

Open mic readers can sign up in advance by emailing sarahjohnson@serenbooks.com or put their name down on the night. Please stick to one A4 page of poetry or prose so that we have time to get though everyone.

Tickets are £3 on the door. £2 of your ticket price is redeemable against any Seren book bought on the night.

Books by both authors will be available at the event but please note we can only accept cash for copies of books by Mari Ellis Dunning.

This event is supported by the Literature Wales Inspiring Communities Fund.

About the authors

Christopher Meredith is the author of author of five novels and five collections of poetry. His poetry collection Still and short novel Please were published simultaneously in 2021. Still explores the plethora of meanings intrinsic to the word ‘still’, meditating on the paradoxes of stillness and motion, on the capacity of memory and imagination, landscapes and art to capture stillness or fixity, when all is implicitly transient and fluid. His novel Please is a love story about the impossibility of being in love and the impossibility of telling stories. Sophisticated and controlled, it explores how hard it is to know yourself or others, how language has the power to conceal even as it reveals. Full of humanity, sly humour and verbal invention, Please is Christopher’s shortest and arguably funniest, most innovative and most outrageous novel to date. Please and Still will be available to buy together for just £15.00 on the night and are also available on the website in our two-book deal.

Mari Ellis Dunning is a poet, researcher and workshop facilitator from West Wales. Her debut poetry collection, Salacia, was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2019. She has since placed second in both the Lucent Dreaming Short Story Competition and the Sylvia Plath Poetry Prize. Mari is a PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, where she is writing a historic novel set in sixteenth-century Wales, exploring the relationship between accusations of witchcraft, the female body and reproduction. Her second collection Pearl and Bone is available now from Parthian. Find out more on her website mariellisdunning.cymru.

Covid-19

Please feel free to wear a mask if it would make you more comfortable. We will open the windows to provide ventilation.

Questions

Please email sarahjohnson@serenbooks.com if you have any queries about this event including those relating to accessibility.