Voices of Resistance

On 15 May at 7.30pm in The Community Works, join us for Voices of Resistance: an evening of powerful, thought-provoking poetry that speaks to histories of migration, conflict, class, exile, and survival. Voices of Resistance brings together four poets, Adnan Al-Sayegh, Jenny Lewis, Anna Robinson, and Jude Rosen, whose work confronts the politics of place, memory, and language.

Tickets are £5 (£2 conc) are available to register in advance here.

Jude Rosen is a second generation Jewish immigrant from the East End who grew up in Walthamstow. She is a former historian, politics lecturer, urban researcher/explorer and translator, who now works with migrants and refugees. As a poet, she explores the relationship of language to place, drawing on archival and oral histories, local ecology and etymology discovered through walking. Her pamphlet A Small Gateway was published by Hearing Eye (2009). Reclamations from London’s Edgelands, (Paekakariki, 2024) grew out of artistic resistance to the Olympic redevelopment in the Lea Valley. Some poems in that collection were published in The Art of Dissent, (Marshgate Press, 2012) South Bank Poetry London Anthology (2017), Long Poem Magazine and Envoi and were performed on poem and living history walks 2015-19, (poemwalks.wordpress.com). A graduate of the Poetry School’s M.A.in Writing Poetry (Newcastle University, 2022),  she is currently revising a long poem of refugee journeys and sequence of poems on Gaza.

Anna Robinson is a poet and essayist from London. She writes on class and place. Her current collection Whatsname Street was published by Smokestack Books in 2021. Ian Macmillan described it as ‘superb!’ Her three previous books are The Night Library (2015) Into the Woods (2014), and The Finders of London (2011).

Adnan al-Sayegh was born in Iraq in 1955 and he has published thirteen collections of poetry, including the 550-page Uruk’s Anthem (1996), the 1380-page The Dice Of The Text (2022) and very short poems (2024). He left his homeland in 1993, lived in Amman, and Beirut then in 1996 took refuge in Sweden. Since 2004 he has been living in exile in London. His poems have been researched by PhD(10) and Masters(31) students. He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman-Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world. His poetry had been translated into many languages. Adnan has worked with Jenny Lewis for 15 years, and they have published books, plays and poetry readings in Britain and abroad.

Jenny Lewis’s recent work includes From Base Materials (Carcanet, 2024) and Let me tell you what I saw (Seren, 2020) a translation with others of extracts from the Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh’s epic anti-war poem, Uruk’s Anthem. Since 2012 she has been working with Al-Sayegh on an award-winning, Arts Council funded project, ‘Writing Mesopotamia’, aimed at fostering relationships and better understanding between Arabic and English-speaking communities.

The building is accessible, but if you have any specific access needs, please drop us an email at oxfordpoetrylibrary@gmail.com beforehand.