August Women

 Sunday 18th August from 7pm (UK time)

Join us for a high summer evening with three exceptional writers.

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Beverley Bie Brahic        Susanna Crossman            S. D. Curtis

Beverley Bie Brahic is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translations include Guillaume Apollinaire:The Little Auto, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, a finalist for the Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translationn; Yves Bonnefoy: The Present Hour; and books by Hélène Cixous, including Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Manhattan, and Hyperdream, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. https://www.beverleybiebrahic.com

Her fifth collection, Apple Thieves, is published this month by Carcanet and available to order here:

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=2518

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, published internationally in print and online. She has also been a stalwart contributor to these online gatherings since 2020.

Home is Where we Start is a memoir about her childhood in a utopian commune and published by Fig Tree/Penguin this month. It's a Guardian  2024 'Book to Look Out For'.

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets.

Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

Her forthcoming novel The Orange Notebooks will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2025. 

https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/

S D Curtis is a publisher, author and sometime translator from Croatian/Bosnian. She studied literature and public art at Roehampton University and has an MA in Education (Applied Linguistics). Her novels So Like Fire (1998) and Leave to Remain (2007) were originally self-published and have since been translated and published in Croatia. She has lived and worked for long periods in Rome, Ljubljana and Zagreb and presently does both in Camden, London.

Co-founder of Istros Books (which specialises in Balkan writing), Susan Curtis is also a poet and her latest collection  Axonas/Axis is available to buy here:

https://burleyfisherbooks.com/products/9781912545414

'In Axonas/Axis, Curtis gives voice to the experience of trauma and recovery through the poetic language of imagery rather than graphic detail, attempting to convey the fundamental twist in the narrative - perhaps even a breakage - that needs to be mended through a synthesis of mind, heart and body working towards the integration of the whole. The whole self. Using Ancient Greek words/concepts and mythology as a springboard to launch into her own personal etymology - the origin and intimate meaning of words dear to her - juxtaposed against what we commonly expect from that word. Ultimately, these poems attempt to tread on Holy ground, the territory where symbol is created from suffering and metaphor from the muscle of language, the territory of healing and wholeness.'

Join us for a memorable summer's evening of poetry and prose, and high-grade discussion.

David