Past Events
Event #3 / 20 May 2016
Moving People: Creative Writing and the Refugee. Room G01, 43 Gordon Square, Friday 20th May (6-730pm)
How does geographic and cultural displacement change what we can say and write? Is there a poetics of displacement? This event featured presentations by Julian Maynard Smith, one of the organisers of the innovative theatre workshop and performance event At Home in Gaza and London, Damian Gorman, poet, writer, workshop facilitator and consultant to the Olive Tree Programme (based at City University London), and Dr Atef Alshaer (University of Westminster) author of Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World (London: Hurst, 2016).
Event #2 / 2 December 2015
Where: The P21 Gallery, 21 Charlton Street, London, NW1 1JD
Time: 7:30pm-9:30pm
The London launch of Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine
In addition to readings by contributors Janne Teller, Ahdaf Soueif, William Sutcliffe, and Steve Willey, author Selma Dabbagh and performance poet Rafeef Ziadah will be reading and performing work.
Event #1 / 9 July 2015
Where: The P21 Gallery, 21 Charlton Street, London, NW1 1JD
Time: 7pm-9pm
For the Watadd launch event, Ammar Haj Ahmad and Steve Willey (co-founders of Watadd) read from their own poetry and from each other’s in translation.
Steve gave the first London public performance of ‘In Sufficiency’, the fourth section of the Living In project, composed, in part, from the testimonies of former political prisoners and Palestinian refugees. Accompanied by Omar Rahwangi on cajón Steve also performed ‘Letters To Palestine: Post Script’, featured in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine (Or Books, forthcoming 2015).
Ammar read poetry composed while living in Syria and in London. He had this to say about the work: “my writing is a comment on what I observe, or maybe it is a reflection, a reflection that spreads through the prism of my soul, when I am totally absorbed in observation, utterly filled by everything that surrounds me. It simply happened that these comments, or possibly, reflections, took the shape of this genre called poetry.”