13 March 2025
Talk: Strategies for Contemporary Womanhood
Embrace the spirit of daring to be different this Women’s History Month in a panel exploring the evolving portrayal of women in pop culture. You’ll hear from a lineup of creatives hosted by Sex Talk’s Emma-Louise Boynton, and get a chance to reflect on your journey with life coach Dina Grishin. Fashion Designer Tolu Coker, the founder of 'Cheer Up Luv' Eliza Hatch, and live poetry from Salena Godden. FREE event!
Apple Store, 235 Regent Street, London, W1B 2EL
Reposting from Canongate Books, beautiful list here. Thank you xx
Women's voices are still underrepresented in publishing, there's still a lot of work to be done to publish the plethora of amazing stories out there. We're very proud of the women we represent, who bring some of the most eclectic, compelling, vibrant writing to our list. We asked Canongaters to pick out a selection of books by women they've been enjoying recently, and tell us the sentence that got them hooked. Here's what they chose:
ALL FOURS - Miranda July
Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this
WITH LOVE GRIEF AND FURY - Salena Godden
Maybe one day, I will stop writing so much protest poetry, stories soaked in trauma and rooted in grief, our anarchy, our hopes for humanity, but then I remember I live and write in the 2020’s and the world is frightening and I am me and here we are
A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN 101 OBJECTS - Annabelle Hirsch
Objects extends through the past like a long hallway, along which, here and there, I open a door or pull something down off a shelf, to shed light on certain aspects of history or tell a particular story
SMALL BODIES OF WATER - Nina Mingya Powles
Which body of water is yours? Is it that I’ve anchored myself in too many places at once, or nowhere at all? The answer lies somewhere between
WHY WOMEN GROW - Alice Vincent
Women have always gardened, but our stories have been buried…We have silently made the world more beautiful, too often without acknowledgement. I wanted to try and change that
BUDDHA DA - Anne Donovan
Ma Da’s a nutter. Radio rental. He’d dae anything for a laugh so he wid . . . but that wis daft stuff compared tae whit he’s went and done noo. He’s turnt intae a Buddhist
A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS - Ayobami Adebayo
When he was a child, Eniolá would shut his eyes whenever he got into trouble, certain that he was not visible to anyone he could not see
RECKLESS DOLLY MAUNDERA - Kate Grenville
Soon as she could walk, she knew she wanted to be outside…The sky above you and the dirt under your feet, and always the shape of the land against the sky like a familiar face
POYUMS - Len Pennie
Come one, come all, to the scene of the crime, Where the victim made every last police report rhyme,She’s bottled her tears for the masses to swallow,She carves out their serving from flesh rendered hollow
THE OUTRUN - Amy Liptrot
I find my favourite place: a slab of rock balanced at a precarious angle at the top of a cliff. I’d come here as a teenager, headphones on, dressed up and frustrated, looking out to the horizon, wanting to escape
Find this list at bookshop.org
Here’s the face of a very young poet. Found this in the archives yesterday digging around for an old Dazed article for a project. Funny how I used to keep all my newspaper pages and magazine cuttings in files. I kept press clippings in folders with the article or review cut out and the date and name of the publication all glued and set there. Even the mean ones. Even the derogatory ones or silly things: I once did a feature testing toothbrushes. I used to keep every scrap of press, every flyer and ticket, memories from all my gigs. That’s thousands of shows since 1994. I kept a paper trail of good times and big nights. No photos, no phones back then. Just the paper trail. The electronic world has erased a lot of this behaviour. We take photos on phones and upload to sites that are electronic scrapbooks and social media. I think I am going to get back on it again. Be a better archivist, keep my paper trail alive, scrapbook my things, because all of sudden it will be 25 years in the future and that means it will be 2050? All of these existential notes and blogs won’t even exist and none of this will be here and nobody will see this page, and all of this work and writing and thought will be erased and gone, like the way we left MySpace and Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, all gone now, our poems and posts, our notes and stories, songs and art, like rusting abandoned shopping trolleys in the lake of the lost forest of time covered in moss and frogs spawn. We won’t be here and nobody will be here to see or feel or remember what we were thinking and how we got here or what we did with our spirit and our minds and our bodies and our words and our short time on earth. I guess that’s why I love books, I love making books, writing longhand, I love writing diaries, I love reading books, books stay put, you can rely on a book, a book on your bedside table, a book in your hand, your notebook in your bag, your novel in your suitcase, it’s all coming with you, it’s real, its yours, it cannot be deleted, it’s all yours, it is your own paper trail.
Raise the Bar
Poetry and Resistance Exhibition
Arnolfini, Bristol
22 March – 01 June 2025
Free entry, Donations welcome
Celebrating 10 years of RTB this powerful exhibition features poetry of revolution, resistance and activism, showcasing the power of poetry to question authority, speak up for the oppressed, and call for radical change.
Featuring poetry from Travis Alabanza, Anthony Anaxagorou James Baldwin, Mahmoud Darwish, Lowkey, Nikita Gill, Salena Godden and Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.
Curated by Danny Carlo Pandolfi.
