Ideally these books should be read together.”
"Salena can write you into a child’s heart and out of the mouth
of a teenager’s inquisitive nature. She can wring the tears from jaded
cynics and make you understand the unique and endless joy of
roller-skates and bicycles as a pathway to freedom." Read more here
"Where do we start with how incredibly awesome Salena Godden is… We want to go on a pub crawl with her pronto and be led astray! Described as a ’21st Century female Bukowski’ her poems grab your
heart and soul and make you want to call you friends immediately
and reminisce about the wild parties, biggest loves and
bad-ass hangovers (The Last Big Drinky is a particular highlight). These poems span twenty years of Salena’s career and the
collection has a wonderful introduction detailing her rock and roll
poetry career. Sit up and take note: Salena is an artist in every sense
of the word, her passion and personality are bigger than the pages
themselves…” Read more here
SPRINGFIELD ROAD
A MEMOIR BY
SALENA GODDEN
‘Honest,
grippingly readable, funny and uplifting’
Maggie Gee, OBE
‘Her writing is
urgent and detailed, colourful and clamorous.
Like all love
stories, her memoir is intense, intimate...’
Iain Finlayson, The Times
As
long ago as 2006, it was suggested to Salena Godden that she should write a
memoir. The details of Salena’s early life – a mixed-race child brought up in
England in the seventies and eighties, whose Irish jazz-musician father leaves
home when she is three and kills himself when she is nine, her Jamaican
mother’s second marriage to a violent stepfather – had all the potential for
the making of a ‘misery memoir’, the kind that were riding high in the
bestseller lists at the time.
But
Salena Godden is incapable of that kind of misery. Joy and humour and
love and tenderness just kept breaking through, and what resulted was Springfield
Road – one of the most life-enhancing memoirs you
will ever read. Make no mistake, Salena does not shy away from the
painful and the difficult episodes of her life, but she just can’t help herself
also celebrating the ridiculous, the beautiful, the thousands of tiny
unremembered acts of kindness and of love that are at once both personal and
universal.
Salena
Godden has been described as ‘the doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (BBC’s
Ian McMillan); ‘the Mae West madam of the Salon’ (The
Sunday Times) and ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang!
Magazine). She is known as The General of the Book Club Boutique, Soho’s
louchest literary salon.
Earlier
this summer Salena published Fishing In The Aftermath / Poems 1994-2014,
marking twenty years of poetry and performance (Burning Eye Books). Her
illustrious career as a spoken word performer is legendary. In Springfield
Road there is a glimpse of what drove her to become
the brilliantly, exuberantly self-made artist that she is.
As
well as her writing and performing, Salena currently works with award-winning
radio producer Rebecca Maxted. 'Try A Little Tenderness – The Lost
Legacy of Little Miss Cornshucks' was aired on BBC Radio 4 in
May and later on BBC World Service in September 2014 to great acclaim. In June,
she read an extract from Springfield Road and
contributed a poem to the much-lauded documentary ‘The History of the
N-Word’ broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Salena has been
appearing on radio and also at festivals throughout the year including
Latitude, Port Eliot, The Green Gathering, Wilderness, Festival No.6 and the
‘Dylan Weekend’ at Laugharne. You’ll find further appearances, gigs and
radio work on her popular ‘Waiting For Godden’ blog and website.
For
further information please contact Rachael Kerr at Unbound
Email:
rachael@unbound.co.uk
More press and reviews:
"Throughout, Godden
writes about a past that is at once deeply personal yet also belongs to the
everyman figure; her descriptions of childhood are simultaneously timeless and
yet rooted in a particular period of British history…" Debjani
Biswas-Hawkes, The Literateur
"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." Lee Bullman, Loud and Quiet Magazine
"Salena Godden
is an absolute master of, knowing your assumptions, playing to them, and then
flipping them completely." Laura Taylor, Write Out Loud
''Salena Godden is
a powerhouse.' Nicole Capo, Sabotage Reviews
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