Our next Needlewriters evening will be on Thursday 11th April 2024, featuring John Freeman (poetry), Minoli Salgado (prose), Rosie Jackson (poetry) and Louise Tondeur (prose).
This will be a LIVE event at the John Harvey Tavern in Lewes (upstairs room): doors 6pm for a 6.30pm start.
Tickets £5 (£3 students/unwaged and claiming benefit) available on the door.
Books will be for sale on the night (cash only please).
John Freeman’s poems have appeared in magazines, anthologies, and twelve collections, the latest of which is Plato’s Peach (Worple Press). His most recent book is a collaboration with photographer Chris Humphrey, Visions of Llandaff (The Lonely Press). What Possessed Me (Worple) won the poetry section of the Wales Book of the Year award in 2017. He won the Bridport Prize in 2018. Some of his essays were published in The Less Received: Neglected Modern Poets (Stride). He grew up in south London and lived for several years in Yorkshire before moving to Wales, where he taught literature and creative writing at Cardiff University. He lives in the Vale of Glamorgan.
Minoli Salgado is a fiction writer, memoirist and academic who lives a peripatetic life, writing in Lewes and teaching in Manchester. Born in Malaysia to Sri Lankan parents and raised in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia before coming to England to study at a school in Devon, her work explores migration and dislocation, and the possibilities of writing the traumas of exceptional violence. Her books include the novel, A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014), a book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home (2022) and a forthcoming study, Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) which was written with the support of a Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. She is the winner of the first SI Leeds Literary Prize and has been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.
Rosie Jackson lives in Teignmouth, Devon. Widely published, she has won many awards, including Commended National Poetry Competition 2023, 1st prize Teignmouth 2021, 1st prize Hedgehog Press 2020, 1st prize Poetry Space 2019, 1st prize Wells 2018, 1st prize Stanley Spencer Competition 2017. She was a Hawthornden fellow 2017 and nominated for the Pushcart prize 2021. Her latest collection is Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023). Other works include Light Makes it Easy (2022), Aloneness is a Many-headed Bird (with Dawn Gorman, 2020), Two Girls and a Beehive: Poems about Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline (2020). www.rosiejackson.org.uk
Louise Tondeur worked as Drama teacher before doing an MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. She published two novels with Headline Review called The Water’s Edge and The Haven Home for Delinquent Girls, then wrote a PhD, started a family, and became a Creative Writing lecturer. Since then, she has published several books, articles, stories and poetry. Poetry credits include Perverse, The Rialto, Under the Radar, Finished Creatures and Shearsman, and her first short story collection, Unusual Places, written live in various locations, was published in 2018. Her second short story collection, Invisible, is due from queer press Knight Errant in 2025. Lou currently teaches for the Open University and the University of Brighton. Lou lives in Hove with her wife and son and two black cats and blogs at: www.louisetondeur.co.uk/blog.
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