Please join us for an evening of readings and talks from Chloe Aridjis, Nancy Campbell, Richard Hamblyn, Eleanor Morgan and Leonie Rushforth, hosted by Prototype with Salon A
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Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7 - £15
This event is part of the Raft Festival programme (see the main festival page on our website for full listings).
One-off tickets are available for every Raft event on a sliding scale basis. We encourage you to consider purchasing a ‘festival pass’ bundle ticket which will allow you, at a reduced rate, to access a given number of events across the full programme (either 5 events, 10 events, or all 30 events). See the link below for more details about these options!
Through the work of poets, artists and historians, this event will uncover and explore unexpected parallels and correspondences at the intersection of poetry, art and geology, through a shared interest in shifting scales and perspectives, spatiality and landscapes, and the meandering patterns of language.
The evening will be chaired by poet, editor and translator Astrid Alben.
Astrid Alben is the author of Ai! Ai! Pianissimo, Plainspeak, Little Dead Rabbit and Klein dood konijn (PoëzieCentrum). Her translation of Anne Vegter’s Eiland berg gletsjer/Eiland mountain glacier received an English PEN Translates Award and was published by Prototype in 2022. Alben set up Salon A with the aim sporadically to convoke human creative kinship, curiosity and unexpected parallels and correspondences.
Chloe Aridjis is the author of three novels – Book of Clouds, Asunder, and Sea Monsters – and, most recently, Dialogue with a Somnambulist, a collection of essays and short fiction, published by House Sparrow Press. She was guest curator of the Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool and has a doctorate in nineteenth century French poetry and magic shows. In 2014 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2020 the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Chloe is a member of Writers Rebel, a group of writers who address the climate emergency and biodiversity loss, and is particularly interested in issues involving animal welfare.
Nancy Campbell is a Scottish writer whose work has been commissioned by the Royal Academy, the British Library and the BBC and, most recently, for a Songbook of Rare Feelings performed by Ensemble VONK in the Netherlands. Nancy was the UK’s Canal Laureate in 2018, generating poems and mixed media collaborations around the waterways, and in 2020 she received the RGS Ness Award for her literary response to the Arctic environment.
Prototype is a publisher of fiction, poetry, anthologies and interdisciplinary projects. With an emphasis on producing unique and beautiful books, Prototype is committed to championing the work of new voices in free-form contemporary literature. Each publication is unique in its form and presentation, and the aesthetic of each object is considered critical to its production. Through the discovery of high-quality work across genres, Prototype strives to increase audiences for experimental writing, as the home for writers and artists whose work requires a creative vision not offered by mainstream literary publishers.
Richard Hamblyn is an environmental writer and historian, whose books include The Invention of Clouds, which won the 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Terra: Tales of the Earth, a study of natural disasters; and The Art of Science, an anthology of readable science writing from the Babylonians to the Higgs boson. His most recent book, The Sea: Nature and Culture, was published in 2021. He teaches in the department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.
Eleanor Morgan is an artist and writer who explores materials and processes of making across species. This has included serenading spiders, teaching ants to draw self-portraits and making a diamond from the dead creatures of the River Thames. Her 2016 illustrated book, Gossamer Days: spiders, humans and their threads , published by Strange Attractor Press, tells the history of the human uses of spider silk. Recent exhibitions include 100 Ways To Say We (Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021) and Le Mostra della Laguna (Sale Docks, Venice, 2021-22).
Leonie Rushforth was born in Ely in 1956. She lives in Hackney. She has won the Keats-Shelley Prize and her poem Church Farm was placed second by Malika Booker in this year’s Poetry London Prize.