Category: Events

Varaidzo to Speak at Final Something Rhymed Salon

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Please meet Varaidzo, the final speaker in this Thursday’s line-up. We’re really looking forward to her thoughts on how best to accelerate gender equality in the literary world.

We still have a few spots left, so please do join in the conversation by emailing us on SomethingRhymed@gmail.com to make one of them yours.

Varaidzo (1)

Varaidzo is a writer, editor and film programmer with a focus on storytelling through fiction, journalism and film. She is an editor at gal-dem.com, an online media platform produced by women of colour, and curates the gal-dem Winter Film Festival which showcases work solely by women of colour filmmakers. As a speaker, she regularly advises film and publishing organisations on how to engage young people and ethnic minorities with media industries. Her writing has appeared in Media Diversified and New Statesman, and her forthcoming essay on navigating black childhood in white spaces will be published in The Good Immigrant (September, 2016)

Salon Three: Genuine Change 

  • Thursday May 12 th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

RSVP: SomethingRhymed@gmail.com

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

Melanie Abrahams to Speak at Final Something Rhymed Salon

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Melanie Abrahams, founder of an events company dedicated to diversity in the arts, will be joining us this Thursday at the third and final Something Rhymed salon. Here we will ask whether it is possible to achieve genuine change in the UK literary scene by attempting to use the master’s tools, as Audre Lorde put it, to dismantle the master’s house.

If you’d like to hear Melanie’s ideas for accelerating positive change and also share your own, please email us at somethingrhymed@gmail.com to book one of the last spots.

© Linda BrownleeMelanie Abrahams is a curator, producer and speaker, who has channeled a love of books and words into projects and escapades. She has curated events and festivals both independently, and through her companies Renaissance One and Tilt, for the Bluecoat, Chris Ofili, Miami Book Fair International and Southbank Centre.  As a literature producer, she has shaped poetry videos for BBC’s The Space with Chris Redmond, and has toured with writers including Ali Smith, Amiri Baraka, Patience Agbabi and Caryl Phillips. This year she partners with the British Library to present London Is The Place For Me, a Caribbean festival of literature and liming, as part of a wider project exploring the theme of independence, and contributes fifty one-to-ones, and supporting public events, to writers and practitioners around England.

You can follow Melanie on Twitter: @wordtraipser 

Salon Three: Genuine Change 

  • Thursday May 12 th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

RSVP: SomethingRhymed@gmail.com

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

Louise Doughty to Speak at Final Something Rhymed Salon

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Here at Something Rhymed, we take any opportunity to celebrate female literary friendship. It is therefore with great pleasure that we welcome Louise Doughty, a dear novelist friend of Jill Dawson, to our third and final salon.

Longstanding readers will already know about Jill’s bond with the Australian writer, Kathryn Heyman, because this pair kicked off our guest blog series back in 2014. Similarly, Louise blogged for us with one of her old friends, Jacqui Lofthouse.

We’ll look forward to seeing Jill and Louise together this coming Thursday, May 12th, and to hearing their ideas for achieving greater diversity in the literary world.BWphotoLD

Louise Doughty’s eighth novel, Black Water, will be published on 2nd June.  Her most recent book was the top ten bestseller Apple Tree Yard, published in 2013 by Faber & Faber UK and Farrar Straus & Giroux New York.  It was longlisted for the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award and the National Book Award Thriller of the Year and is published or being translated into twenty-seven languages worldwide.  A four-part BBC1 adaptation is currently in production with Emily Watson in the lead role.  Doughty’s sixth novel, Whatever You Love, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has also won awards for radio drama and short stories, along with publishing one work of non-fiction, A Novel in a Year, based on her popular newspaper column. She is a critic and cultural commentator for UK and international newspapers and broadcasts regularly for the BBC.

You can follow Louise on Twitter: @doughtylouise

Salon Three: Genuine Change 

  • Thursday May 12 th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

RSVP: SomethingRhymed@gmail.com

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

Jill Dawson to Speak at Final Something Rhymed Salon

Published on by emmaclairesweeney2 Comments

We are delighted to welcome award-winning novelist, Jill Dawson, to our third and final salon in this series. Jill will be helping us to come up with strategies for improving diversity in the literary world.

Jill Dawson-2 copy

Jill Dawson is the author of nine novels and winner of an Eric Gregory Award for poetry. Fred and Edie, her third novel, published in 2001, was shortlisted for the Orange and Whitbread prizes and voted ‘one of fifty essential novels by a living author’.  The Great Lover, about the poet Rupert Brooke, was a best-seller and Richard and Judy book-club choice.  Her seventh novel, Lucky Bunny, won a Fiction Uncovered award.  The Tell-Tale Heart was nominated for the Folio Prize.  Her latest, about the writer Patricia Highsmith, is The Crime Writer, to be published 2016. In addition Jill is a tutor of creative writing, credited with bringing many new writers to publication through the one to one mentoring scheme she set up, Gold Dust (www.gold-dust.org.uk).

Please join Jill and us this coming Thursday for drinks, snacks and fruitful conversation.

  • Salon Three: Genuine Change 
  • Thursday May 12 th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

RSVP: SomethingRhymed@gmail.com

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

 

Final Salon in this Something Rhymed Series

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We had another full house last night at our second Something Rhymed Salon, when we talked about the devaluing of so-called women’s issues. Our speakers fed us a gloriously varied platter of food for the mind, and the conversation continued over madeleines, sparkling water and plenty of wine.

Emily and I were pleased to welcome both men and women to our shindig, and we were particularly happy to hear people comment on the friendly atmosphere created by our fantastic panellists: Arifa Akbar, Sarah LeFanu, Karen Maitland and Michèle Roberts.

Do join us for our third and final salon, next Thursday May 12th at 6.30pm, when we’ll have an equally stellar line-up:

Melanie Abrahams: Founder of Renaissance One – a literary events company committed to diversity in the arts.

Jill Dawson: Orange Prize shortlisted novelist.

Louise Doughty: Costa Award shortlisted novelist and former Booker Prize judge.

Varaidzo: Arts and Culture Editor at gal-dem – an online magazine comprising almost fifty women of colour.

To grab a place, please email us at SomethingRhymed@gmail.com.

Something Rhymed Salon 3 p1 flyerPlease click on the image below to enlarge:

Something Rhymed Salon 3 p2 flyer

Something Rhymed Salon 3 p3 flyer

Arifa Akbar to Speak at Second Something Rhymed Salon

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At tonight’s Something Rhymed salon,  journalist and literary critic, Arifa Akbar, will be sharing a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her experiences as a literary editor and reviewer.

If you would like to join in the conversation, please nab one of the last spots by emailing SomethingRhymed@gmail.com.

The Independent Arts Correspondant Arifa Akbar.
The Independent Arts Correspondant Arifa Akbar.

Arifa Akbar is a journalist and literary critic. She is the former literary editor of The Independent, where she worked from October 2001 until April 2016, as a reporter and arts correspondent before joining the books desk in 2009.

She was a judge for the Orwell Prize in 2013, the Fiction Uncovered Prize in 2014, and the British Book Industry Award in 2016.

Arifa has chaired author interviews at the London Literature Festival, Foyles, Asia House and the Bath Literature Festival.

She is a regular newspaper reviewer on Sky News, and reviews books in print and on radio. She studied English Literature at university and then completed a Masters in Gender Studies, specialising in French Feminism and ‘writing the body’.

  • Salon Two: So-called Women’s Issues 
  • Wednesday May 4th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

Michèle Roberts to Speak at Second Something Rhymed Salon

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imageWe are honoured that Michèle Roberts has agreed to speak about the devaluing of so-called ‘women’s issues’ at tomorrow’s Something Rhymed salon.

Female friendship is at the heart of her writing and feminism – something she reflected on with her own literary friend, Sarah LeFanu, in September’s guest post.

 

Michèle Roberts (left) and Sarah LeFanu (right) at Sissinghurst in 1981.
Michèle Roberts (left) and Sarah LeFanu (right) at Sissinghurst in 1981.

Michèle Roberts has published over twenty books: novels, poetry, essays, memoir, artist’s books. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of East Anglia, a Chavalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her latest publication, with Jenny Newman and Sarah LeFanu, is The Lille Diaries. She currently teaches a Guardian Masterclass (mistressclass?) on novel-writing.

Salon Two: So-called Women’s Issues 

  • Wednesday May 4th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

Sarah LeFanu to Speak at Second Something Rhymed Salon

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We are delighted that Sarah LeFanu has agreed to share her wealth of experience with us at the Arts Council sponsored Something Rhymed salon on May 4th. It will be a particular delight to meet Sarah since we were so captivated by the thoughts on female literary friendship that she explored in her guest post last year.

Sarah LeFanu
Sarah LeFanu

Sarah LeFanu was an editor at The Women’s Press for ten years, and was responsible for their ground-breaking feminist science fiction list. She has edited seven anthologies of original stories (including three all-women anthologies), and her books include Rose Macaulay: A Biography and its companion volume, Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal. For six years (2003 – 2009) she was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival, where she consistently promoted women writers.

If you would like to join Sarah LeFanu, Karen Maitland, Arifa Akbar and Michele Roberts to discuss the problem of gender inequality in the literary world, do email us at SomethingRhgymed@gmail.com.

  • Salon Two: So-called Women’s Issues 
  • Wednesday May 4th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

600 by 150_chalkboard
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

 

Karen Maitland to Speak at Second Something Rhymed Salon

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We are delighted to welcome bestselling author Karen Maitland to the second Something Rhymed salon on Wednesday May 4th.

If you’d like to talk with her about the devaluing of books that explore so-called women’s issues, please book your free ticket via SomethingRhymed@gmail.com.

Karen Maitland
Karen Maitland

Karen Maitland’s medieval thrillers explore the extraordinary lives of ordinary women who have been written out of history. Her historical novels include The Owl Killers –  a novel about the beguinages, the medieval cities of women – Company of Liars, The Gallows Curse, Falcons of Fire & Ice, The Vanishing Witch and The Raven’s Head. She is published by Headline UK, Penguin UK and Random House USA.

Karen is also one of six historical crime writers – Philip Gooden, Susannah Gregory, Michael Jecks, Bernard Knight and Ian Morson – together known as the Medieval Murderers. Karen has written five historical crime novels with the group—The Sacred Stone, Hill of Bones, The First Murder, The False Virgin and The Deadliest Sin, published by Simon & Schuster.

Her first novel, The White Room, was short listed for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. In 2008, Company of Liars was shortlisted for the Macavity Award USA, for Best Historical Mystery. The Owl Killers was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award USA, in 2009, and in 2015 Karen won the Prix du Balai d’or for her novel La Malédiction du Norfolk (The Gallows Curse). French translation published by Sonatine.

Karen has doctorate in Psycholinguistics. She is a member of the Crime Writers Association, International Thriller Writers, the Historical Novelist Association and the Society of Authors. She is also one of The History Girls bloggers and her history blog appears on their website on the 8th of each month.

  • Salon Two: So-called Women’s Issues 
  • Wednesday May 4th, 6.30pm-9.00pm 
  • New York University in London, 6 Bedford Square (Gower/Bloomsbury Street side), WC1B 3RA
  • Nearest tube: Tottenham Court Road. Holborn, Russell Square, Goodge Street and Warren Street are also close by.
  • Disabled access and facilities. Please do let us know if you have any access needs.

Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.
Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for our readers.

So-called Women’s Issues

Published on by emmaclairesweeney1 Comment

The first Something Rhymed salon was full of informed discussion and spirited debate, all washed down with great wine and plentiful supplies of madeleines. Guests came alone or accompanied by old friends, and plenty a new friendship was forged.   

Our panellists gave candid accounts of their thoughts on the latest VIDA count, which shows the continuing lack of gender parity across the literary pages. And they provided us with behind-the-scenes glimpses of the gender issues they’ve confronted during their careers in the media and publishing.

We will keep track of the suggestions for accelerating change that crop up during this salon series, and we’ll post a list on the site. If you have any ideas, please do share them by using the comments facility and we’ll make sure to include them in our roundup.

Our second salon is fast approaching, and we have an equally stellar line-up of guests. This Wednesday, you can meet journalist and literary critic, Arifa Akbar; biographer and former senior editor at The Women’s Press, Sarah LeFanu; bestselling author, Karen Maitland; and Booker Prize shortlisted novelist, Michèle Roberts.

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance via SomethingRhymed@gmail.com  

Something Rhymed Salon 2 flyer

Please click on the image below to enlarge the information:

Something Rhymed Salon 2 flyer p2Our friends at Naked Wines have kindly provided the wines for our salon series, and they are even offering a discount especially for readers of Something Rhymed: www.nakedwines.com/rhymedwww.nakedwines.com/rhymedSomething Rhymed Salon 2 flyer p3