Celebrating Sanctuary, the annual festival which celebrates the work of refugee artists in London and the UK, is pleased to announce that Book Slam will be bringing a vibrant literary strand, produced especially for the 2008 National Year of Reading, to this year's festival to be held on Sunday, 15 June 2008, 2 - 7pm, at Bernie Spain Gardens, Upper Ground, South Bank, London SE1 (adjacent to Oxo Tower Wharf; nearest train/tube: Blackfriars, Southwark, Waterloo). Admission is free.
Book Slam
It will be the first time that there will be a spoken word/ literature strand at Celebrating Sanctuary. Book Slam, the brainchild of writer/ pop star Ben Watt and writer/ Sony Award winning pop tart Patrick Neate, is London's unique and cool literary night out ("clubbing for grown-ups") regularly featuring all the top writers, the finest live music and DJs. Their guests have included Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Adele, Will Self, Nick Hornby, Kate Nash and many more. Patrick Neate will be the compère of the Book Slam session in the Acoustic Yurt (nomadic tent) at Celebrating Sanctuary, hosting an afternoon of music, readings and renditions. Partners, including Penguin Books and Exiled Writers Ink, will also be present.
Special Commissions To Writers
Celebrating Sanctuary has commissioned two writers to produce a new collaborative piece about refugee issues to be performed as part of the Book Slam session in the Acoustic Yurt. Newly published UK writer Nikita Lalwani (her debut novel The Gifted is serialized this month on BBC Radio 4) and Mir Mahfuz Ali, one of Exiled Writers Ink's emerging writers and refugee from Bangladesh, join forces to create an epic poem which resounds to the themes of Celebrating Sanctuary and Refugee Week: flight, arrival, sanctuary, prejudice, identity, welcome and finding your own voice in a new country. The work will be premiered at the festival with a reading by both authors. It will then be distributed through the Celebrating Sanctuary and Refugee Week websites, and promoted through Exiled Writers Ink and similar networks as well as offered to relevant magazines and radio programmes.
Celebrating Sanctuary has also commissioned writing workshops from Jacqueline Walker who dominated the literary pages and airwaves earlier this year with the publication of her novel Pilgrim State. She will be leading a series of workshops with 16 and 17 year old students at the Capital City Academy in Willesden, where 93% of the student body have arrived unaccompanied from overseas. The workshops will be based around her novel Pilgrim State and Jackie will act as an inspirational mentor for the students as they produce work which they will perform with her at the festival as part of the Book Slam session.
The Book Slam at Celebrating Sanctuary line-up also features Vesna Maric from the From There To Here anthology of stories about immigrating to and arrival in the UK, poets Francesca Beard and Moniza Alvi, comic Dan Antopolski, spoken word fireworks from Crisis & Brother Niyi and music from Temsegene & Grum (Ethiopia), the Lani Singers (Indonesia),Tara Jaff & Roskar Nasan (Kurdistan/Syria), Mashasha (Zimbabwe) and Abdullah Chhadeh Duo (Syria/UK).
About Celebrating Sanctuary 2008
Celebrating Sanctuary, part of Refugee Week (16 - 22 June) and the Coin Street Festival, is an extraordinary event which gathers together musicians, dancers and artists from all corners of the globe to celebrate the work of refugee artists in the UK. Now in its ninth year, Celebrating Sanctuary demonstrates that such a vibrant panorama of sight, sound, aroma and taste would not exist had it not been for the UK's hard won tradition of providing sanctuary to those fleeing persecution from many parts of the globe. Musical highlights at this year's event include headlining Indie rockers Noisettes, Congolese band Kasai Masai, Sephardic band Los Desterrados and Russian singer song-writer Angelina. There will also be a dedicated dance stage, workshop activities for children, as well as a multitude of stalls selling mouth-watering dishes and thirst-quenching drinks from all over the world, plus food and information stalls in the Festival marketplace.
For more information and the full line-up please visit: http://www.myspace.com/celebratingsanctuary
For more information about Book Slam please visit:
http://www.bookslam.com
