When

Where

Summary

Poetry of Migration

6 June 2016  | 5:30pm–8:30pm | Click here to book your free ticket
Londonewcastle Project Space | 28 Redchurch St, London E2 7DP

Join us for a participatory evening of performance poetry, featuring a panel of renowned poets, on the theme of migration. Hosted by Michael Rosen, with other confirmed poets including Jackie Kay, Ruth Padel, Sophie Herxheimer and Karen McCarthy Woolf, the event will bring new perspectives and challenge ideas about the ongoing migration ‘crisis’ through the medium of poetry.

We welcome submissions from from the public, from professional or non-professional writers, but ideally those with migration or refugee experience. A selection of these poems will be chosen by a our panel of poets and performed at the beginning of the evening. Please submit your poetry to Faiza at faiza@migrationmuseum.org by 1 June 2016.

Please note this is event is free, but pre-booking is essential due to limited capacity.

This event is part of our exhibition, Call me by my name: Stories from Calais and beyond, exploring the complexity and human stories behind the current refugee crisis, with a particular focus on the Calais camp.

Chair

Michael Rosen is from London and has been writing poems and stories since 1970. He was Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009, broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 4 with 'Word of Mouth', has a monthly column on education in the Guardian, and is Professor of Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2014, he gave the inaugural annual Public Lecture for the Migration Museum , drawing on his own family's history of migration as well as investigating the stigmatising public language towards migrants.

Speakers

Jackie Kay MBE FRSE is a Scottish poet and novelist. She was named Scots Makar, the Scottish poet laureate in March 2016. She has published five collections of poetry for adults and several for children. The Adoption Papers won the Forward Prize, a Saltire prize and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award; Fiere, her most recent collection of poems was shortlisted for the COSTA award. Her novel Trumpet won the Guardian Fiction Award and was shortlisted for the IMPAC award. Red Dust Road won the Scottish Book of the Year Award, and the London Book Award. She is Chancellor of the University of Salford and Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

Ruth Padel is a prize-winning British poet and writer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, author of The Mara Crossing: Poems and Prose on Migration, and Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, poems on creativity, conflict and the Middle East, shortlisted for the 2014 T S Eliot Prize. She teaches Creative Writing at King’s College London. See www.ruthpadel.com