LIVEwire at The Edge
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
LIVEwire is back at The Edge in Chorlton with an electric line-up featuring internationally acclaimed poet and author Salena Godden reading from her brand-new collection, plus Molly Naylor (co-writer of Sky One comedy After Hours) and Nafeesa Hamid, a British Pakistani poet, spoken word artist and playwright based in the Midlands.
Three decades since her groundbreaking debut on the UK poetry scene, Salena Godden (recently seen alongside Rebecca Hurst and Christine Roseeta Walker at the Burgess Foundation) unveils her boldest and most definitive collection yet With Love, Grief and Fury. Out in May with Canongate, the new collection contains love poems for people and the planet, poems of grief brimming with compassion, and poems of fire and fury that kick some ass.
Salena Godden is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death (Canongate, 2021) won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Her work has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize, and has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film, and she was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022. She crowdfunded and published Springfield Road, a memoir of her childhood, with Unbound in 2014.
In addition to this, she has released the poetry collections Fishing In The Aftermath (Burning Eye Books, 2014), Under The Pier (Nasty Little Press, 2011) and Pessimism Is For Lightweights – 13 pieces of Courage and Resistance (Rough Trade Books, 2018). From this, her poem ‘Pessimism is for Lightweights’ became a public poetry art piece and was on display outside the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol for 18 months – it is now on permanent display at Manchester’s People’s History Museum.
And if you’re on the other side of the Pennines, fear not as LIVEwire heads to Hyde Park Book Club for Leeds Lit Fest, hosting Salena Godden in what they’re promising will be a night of electric spoken word poetry on 15 June (7-8pm, £6). She’s performing in Leeds for the first time in over two years and will be supported on the night by some of the region’s finest emerging talent.
Following sold-out shows in 2019 and 2021, LIVEwire returned to The Edge in March, featuring a performance from Forward Prize-winning British-Somali author Momtaza Mehri, Birmingham Poet Laureate 2020-2022 Casey Bailey, and award-winning performance poet Jess Green.
LIVEwire is a new poetry organisation that has evolved from indie spoken word record label Nymphs & Thugs and specialises in live events and writer development, championing poets from all walks of life. Featuring internationally acclaimed poets alongside some of the most exciting newly established poets on the UK’s thriving scene, “LIVEwire will transform your perception of poetry forever”.
