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 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)
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.
Melanie 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Introducing the final guest in Thursday’s line up: Michael Caines.
Michael Caines
Michael works at the Times Literary Supplement. He has edited an anthology of plays by eighteenth-century women, and written a book about Shakespeare and the eighteenth century. He is currently working on a very short book about the failings of literary prizes. Perhaps he’ll reveal more on Thursday!
Something Rhymed is keen to include both men and women in the conversation about gender equality, and, in order for the salons to be more than just talking shops, it’s crucial that we have panellists who have associations with some of the publications that appear to come out poorly from the VIDA survey.
Emily Midorikawa will be hosting this salon at New York University London, and I will be chairing the discussion between Michael Caines, Maggie Gee, Harriett Gilbert and Salena Godden.
Please join them and us this Thursday for drinks, snacks and fruitful conversation.
In the spirit of Something Rhymed, Salena Godden will be joining her literary friend, Maggie Gee, at our first salon. The pair will be discussing the latest VIDA count, which reveals major imbalances at premiere publications.
Salena Godden is one of Britain’s foremost spoken word artists and poets. A regular performer at literary festivals in a career that is now entering its third decade, Salena tops the bill at literary events both nationally and internationally.
She’s appeared as a guest and writer for many BBC Radio programmes including The Verb, Saturday Live, Loose Ends and Fact To Fiction and she has written and presented several arts documentaries and a play for the BBC too. Burning Eye Books published her first full collectionFishing In The Aftermath: Poems 1994 – 2014, marking twenty years of poetry and performance, with the majority of the work included previously unpublished in book form. Her literary childhood memoir Springfield Road was successfully crowd funded and published with Unbound Books in 2014.
Widely recognised as a trailblazer for fellow performers, Salena has also dedicated herself to mentoring newcomers to the scene. Her voice is distinctive and unique, her performances are electrifying, hilarious, intensely powerful and full of warmth.
New Book News
• Various poems by Salena Godden will be published in ‘Untitled Two‘ The Neu Reekie anthology. Published by Polygon Books and Neu Reekie, publication date, May 1st 2016
• Short Story ‘The Camden Blood Thieves’ by Salena Godden will be published in The Unreliable Guide to London – a collection of London short fiction, published with Influx Press, launched July 18th 2016
• Commissioned essay ‘Shade’ by Salena Godden will be included in ‘The Good Immigrant’ / Twenty-one authors writing about what it means to be BAME in the UK in 2016, edited by Nikesh Shukla, published by Unbound Books and released September 22nd 2016
Press Quotes
‘Salena Godden is a powerhouse.’ Sabotage Reviews
‘Godden writes about a past that is at once deeply personal yet also belongs to the everyman figure; her descriptions of childhood are timeless.’ The Literateur
‘Her writing is urgent and detailed, colourful and clamorous. Like all love stories, her memoir is intense and intimate.’ The Times
“Salena Godden is an absolute master of, knowing your assumptions, playing to them, and then flipping them completely.” Write Out Loud
“Salena Godden follows up her recent poetry anthology with a lyrical and witty memoir painting a portrait of the artist as a young girl. Springfield Road tells the wide-eyed tale of Godden’s childhood as the daughter of a jazz musician and a go-go dancer set against the lovingly rendered backdrop of 1970s Hastings. Springfield Road’s prose wavers effortlessly throughout, from tender poignancy to raw, gritty realism and this lovely book serves to remind us that however much the world has changed in the last forty years, in many ways it is still exactly the same.” Loud and Quiet Magazine
Longstanding readers of Something Rhymed will remember that novelist Maggie Gee wrote a piece back in 2014 about her friendship with poet Salena Godden.
You will now have the opportunity to meet Maggie in person at Something Rhymed’s literary salon on Thursday April 28th at New York University London, 6.30pm.
Along with Harriett Gilbert, Maggie will be discussing the problem of gender inequality in the literary world. Together with input from the audience, our speakers hope to come up with some positive solutions.
Maggie has written twelve novels, including The White Family, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Impac Prize, The Ice People (revised edition 2008), and two linked satires about Britain and Uganda, My Cleaner and My Driver (2009), which were called ‘worldly, witty, enjoyable, impressive’ by Doris Lessing. She has also written an acclaimed writer’s memoir, My Animal Life, 2010, (‘exceptionally interesting and brave…a wonderful book”, Claire Tomalin) and a collection of short stories, The Blue.
Maggie is Vice-President of the UK’s Royal Society of Literature and was its first female Chair of Council, 2004-2008. Her books have been translated into 13 languages including Chinese, and she is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Though her themes include war, ecological catastrophe, global warming and racism, her books are always funny as well as serious. In 2012 there was an international conference about her work at St Andrew’s University.
Maggie Gee’s latest novel, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, is a comedy that brings Virginia Woolf back to life in the 21st century in Manhattan and Istanbul.
We are delighted to welcome Harriett Gilbert to Something Rhymed’s first literary salon on Thursday April 28th at New York University London, 6.30pm.
The salons are aimed at writers, reviewers, bloggers, editors, journalists, agents and others who work in the literary industries or who are simply interested in this topic.
You are invited! Come alone, or, in the spirit of SomethingRhymed.com, you might want to invite a literary friend. Either way, please do join us for drinks and fruitful conversation. To get your name on the guest list, please email SomethingRhymed@gmail.com.
Harriett Gilbert
Harriett Gilbert presents A Good Read on Radio 4 and World Book Club on the BBC World Service.
She began writing fiction in her twenties, when she was not long out of drama college and had just been touring the primary schools of England with an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories; she played the Mother Elephant. It was winter; the only job on offer was a small part in an Agatha Christie one-acter, for no pay. She owned an Olivetti portable. Authorship suddenly seemed attractive.
Since then, she’s published six novels, including Hotels with Empty Rooms and The Riding Mistress. In 2004 she founded the MA in Creative Writing (Novels) at City University London, and was course director for four years.
For many years Harriett also worked for the press, reviewing and writing about books and authors for Time Out magazine before becoming literary editor of the New Statesman. She’s published non-fiction books on journalism, feminism and sexuality.
Since the early 1990s she’s presented arts programmes for the BBC, including interviewing a wide range of authors: from Toni Morrison to Marian Keyes, Doris Lessing to Malorie Blackman, Arundhati Roy to PD James
You will now have the opportunity to meet Maggie in person at Something Rhymed’s literary salon on Thursday April 28th at 
Something Rhymed 