Date: Thursday 18th April
Venue: Watershed (Cinema 3)
Time: 20:00- 22:00 (please note: this was previously listed as a 19:30 start)
Tickets: £8.50/5

Back in the 1980s the UK had little idea of the wealth of poetry coming from the Caribbean. In 1986, the BBC’s thought-provoking Arena film Caribbean Nights: Poetry changed all that. Featuring Trinidadian intellectual Darcus Howe chairing an illuminating discussion with St Lucian poet Derek Walcott (1992 Nobel Prize for Literature), pioneering British-Jamaican reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and emerging British-Guyanese poet Fred D’Aguiar, there are also clips of, among others, the electrifying Jamaican dub poet Michael Smith and innovative Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite, who championed using Caribbean English in Poetry.

Come and watch Caribbean Nights: Poetry which, even now, feels fresh in its insights. Afterwards, poet and editor Rishi Dastidar, 2023 TS Eliot Prize winner Anthony Joseph and Louisa Adjoa Parker will talk to noted Bristol academic Madhu Krishnan about the vital need for diverse poetry in our everyday lives, before Helen Thomas reads a new poem inspired by the film.

Your Local Arena is a Lucy Hannah & Speaking Volumes co-production featuring BBC Arena’s film archive. Funded by Arts Council England.

Your Local Arena is a unique project featuring iconic films from the archives of BBC TV’s Arena, the pioneering cultural documentary series. It includes new poems inspired by the Arena films and panel talks to explore the continuing relevance of the Arena archives today. The Your Local Arena concept was developed by Lucy Hannah and Speaking Volumes, with Arena’s award-winning director/editor Anthony Wall as creative consultant, and funded by Arts Council England.

Speaking Volumes is a live literature organisation specialising in getting underrepresented voices heard, reaching diverse audiences and finding exciting ways to present the work of writers.

Anthony Joseph:

Dr Anthony Joseph F.R.S.L. is an award winning Trinidad-born poet, novelist, academic and musician. His 2022 collection 'Sonnets for Albert' won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Poetry. He is the author of four previous poetry collections and three novels. His 2018 novel 'Kitch: A Fictional Biography of a Calypso Icon' was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction. In 2019, he was awarded a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. His most recent fiction is the experimental novel 'The Frequency of Magic'. As a musician, he has released eight critically acclaimed albums, and in 2020 received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Composers Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kings College, London.

Rishi Dastidar:

Rishi Dastidar is a fellow of The Complete Works, and a consulting editor at 'The Rialto' magazine. A poem from his debut 'Ticker-tape' (Nine Arches Press) was included in 'The Forward Book of Poetry 2018'. A second book, 'Saffron Jack' (Nine Arches Press), was published in 2020. He is editor of 'The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century' (Nine Arches Press), and also co-editor of 'Too Young, Too Loud, Too Different: Poems from Malika’s Poetry Kitchen' (Corsair). His third collection, 'Neptune’s Projects', is published by Nine Arches Press and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. He also reviews poetry for 'The Guardian' (UK) and is chair of 'Wasafiri'.

Louisa Adjoa Parker:

Louisa Adjoa Parker is an RSA Fellow, a writer and poet of English-Ghanaian heritage who lives in southwest England. Her first poetry collections were published by Cinnamon Press, and her third, 'How to wear a skin', was published by Indigo Dreams. Her debut short story collection, 'Stay with me', was published in 2020 by Colenso Books. Her poetry pamphlet, 'She can still sing', was published by Flipped Eye in June 2021, and she has a coastal memoir forthcoming with Little Toller Books.

Louisa’s poetry and prose has been widely published. She has been highly commended by the Forward Prize; twice shortlisted by the Bridport Prize; and her grief poem, Kindness, was commended by the National Poetry Competition 2019. She has performed her work in the south west and beyond and has run many writing w0rkshops. Louisa has written extensively about ethnically diverse history and rural racism, and as well as writing, is co-director of The Inclusion Agency, which provides Equality, Diversity and Inclusion consultancy. She is a sought-after speaker and trainer on rural racism, Black history, embracing difference, and mental health.

Madhu Krishnan:

Madhu Krishnan is Professor of African, World and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bristol. She is author of ‘Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications’ (2014), ‘Writing Spatiality in West Africa: Colonial Legacies in the Anglophone/Francophone Novel’ (2018) and ‘Contingent Canons: African Literature and the Politics of Location’ (2018). She is currently working on a five-year project funded by the ERC titled 'Literary Activism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Commons, Publics and Networks of Practice'.

Helen Thomas:

Helen Thomas is a writer of Sierra Leonean and Irish heritage who was born in London. She moved to Cornwall over twenty years ago after receiving her DPhil in English Literature. In 2020, she distributed 'Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and Law, 1770-2020' as a free, 500-page e-book to celebrate Black History Month,and in 2022 she published '1562', a volume of poetry voicing the fictional lives of six black women from six ports in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Britain. Since then Helen has been experimenting with poetry and poetic plays, writing work that fuses literary genres and highlights the experience of black migrants in Britain as well as their contributions to British culture. In 2023, she was commissioned to co-create a play with young people in Plymouth as part of the With Flying Colours and Beyond Face Theatre Company partnership. She is currently working on two poetic plays and a new collection of poems.

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