Seren Events Archive
The latest news on Seren’s books, authors, events and prizes.
St David’s Festival of Ideas is a volunteer-run festival set up in 2019 with the aim of bringing people together from diverse disciplines, backgrounds and opinions to see if new ideas and solutions can be birthed in the process. After moving online in 2021, they are returning in person in March 2022. Eric Ngalle Charles, whose debut collection is forthcoming from Seren in 2022, will be in conversation with Jon Gower in How Books Change the World. Chaired by Amanda Stone. With nearly 200,000 books published in the UK each year they'll discuss how some of them catch the uplift of spirit, time...
These two experienced poets will share their approaches to writing poetry inspired by photographs, and encourage new writing using images drawn from archives, books, family photos, news, historical and contemporary sources. Sarah Wimbush is the author of two prize-winning pamphlets: The Last Dinosaur in Doncaster (Smith|Doorstop 2021) and Bloodlines (Seren 2020). Her first collection Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands will be published by Bloodaxe in 2022. Robert Powell, is a former photography critic and curator who has produced four poetry collections as well as an artist...
In this Digital Taster Course for Tŷ Newydd run by Rosalind Hudis, you will look at the link between poetry and science, and the science of poetry. You'll spend a little time exploring some of the ways poets have embraced science topics in lyric poetry. Then it’s your turn: after choosing a short sample of science writing, you’ll be guided through a step-by-step approach to transform it into the first draft of a lyric poem. No previous scientific knowledge required! You will leave the course with a renewed energy, the elements and ideas on how to get started. The workshop will last an hour,...
PAST AND PRESENT: WHOSE TRADITION IS WHOSE? All of this year’s Past and Present events involve contemporary poets responding to the work of modernist poets. This event takes a slightly different angle by inviting Yang Lian and Adnan Al-Sayegh, two poets from non-Western literary traditions, to respond to the importance and challenges of drawing upon this (white, western) tradition in their own work. Is modernism relevant for them? Why and how? And what obstacles come between them and drawing upon such traditions? How do these influences interact with different cultural influences? Adnan Al-...
TRANSLATING GILGAMESH. This reading will present three contrasting approaches to rewriting the Epic of Gilgamesh, originally written in Akkadian in the late 2nd millennium BC. Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh will read (with translations from Jenny Lewis) from Let Me Tell You What I Saw (Seren 2020) and from his epic poem Uruk’s Anthem, which he wrote while a conscripted soldier, and later a detainee, in the Iran-Iraq war. Both draw upon Gilgamesh. Jenny Lewis’s interest in Gilgamesh sets out from a sense of culture as permanently unstable and open to different contested interpretations. In ...
Join us for a poetry reading from Katrina Naomi and Penelope Shuttle to celebrate both International Women’s Day and the launch of Hypatia’s new Women in Word Bookshop which opens in March. Katrina Naomi has published two collections for Seren, The Way the Crocodile Taught Me (2016) and Wild Persistence (2020). Her recent work has been broadcast on Radio 4’s Front Row, Poetry Please, BBC TV Spotlight and has appeared on Poems on the Underground.Tickets are £6.00 (space is limited so prebooking is advised). If you can't make it in person, Live Stream tickets are also available at £3.00. For...