Tag: New Fiction

Join us for the first in-person event held at Pages of Hackney for over 18 months! We’re incredibly excited to be welcoming Vanessa Onwuemezi to discuss her phenomenal debut collection of short fiction, DARK NEIGHBOURHOOD, with poet Kayo Chingonyi. Tickets are very limited, so please ensure you book very soon if you’d like to join us.

In her brilliantly inventive debut collection, Vanessa Onwuemezi takes readers on a surreal and haunting journey through a landscape on the edge of time. At the border with another world, a line of people wait for the gates to open; on the floor of a lonely room, a Born Winner runs through his life’s achievements and losses; in a suburban garden, a man witnesses a murder that pushes him out into the community. Struggling to realize the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters ofDARK NEIGHBOURHOOD roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame. With a detached eye and hallucinatory vision, they observe the worlds around them as the line between dream and reality dissolves and they themselves begin to fragment. Electrifying and heady, and written with a masterful lyrical precision,DARK NEIGHBOURHOOD heralds the arrival of a strikingly original new voice in fiction.

Vanessa Onwuemezi is a writer and poet living in London. Her work has appeared in Prototype, frieze and Five Dials. Her story ‘At the Heart of Things’ won the The White Review Short Story Prize 2019. Dark Neighbourhood is her debut short story collection.

Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. He is the author of the poetry collection A Blood Condition (Chatto Poetry) and a forthcoming work of non-fiction Prodigal (Picador). His first full-length collection, Kumukanda, won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre First Poetry Collection Prize, the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Jhalak Prize. Kayo is a fellow of the Complete Works programme for diversity and quality in British Poetry, was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, was awarded a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was an Associate Poet at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He has performed his work at festivals and events around the world, is Poetry Editor for The White Review, and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University.

To mark the return of our much-missed in-person events programme, we are absolutely delighted to be welcoming Tice Cin to read from and discuss her incredible debut novel, KEEPING THE HOUSE. Tice will be joined in conversation by Lola Olufemi, a pairing that feels perfect for our first in-person event since February 2020, and we’d love it if you could be there!

The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud; that’s where we put the heroin . . .

Ayla has a plan. There’s a stash of heroin; just waiting to be imported. No one seems sure what to do with it; but Ayla’s a gardener; and she knows.

From secretive men’s clubs to spotless living rooms; KEEPING THE HOUSE is an electrifying debut that lifts the lid on a covert world. But just as it offers a fresh take on the London drug trade and its machinery; it tells the story of three women in one house: a grandmother; a mother; and the daughter; each dealing with the intricacies and reverberations of community; migration and love.

[Read an excerpt of KEEPING THE HOUSE]

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist from north London. A London Writers Award-winner, her work has been published by Extra Teeth and Skin Deep and commissioned by places like Battersea Arts Centre and St Paul’s Cathedral. An alumnus of Barbican Young Poets, she now creates digital art as part of Design Yourself – a collective based at the Barbican Centre – exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything. A producer and DJ, she is releasing an EP, Keeping the House, to accompany her debut novel of the same name.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and CREAM/Stuart Hall foundation researcher from London. Her work focuses on the uses of the feminist imagination and its relationship to cultural production, political demands and futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, forthcoming from Hajar Press in 2021 and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.

Venue Information

We’ve waited until now in order to ensure that we could host an event that complies with all current Covid-related guidelines, in order to minimise any risks to our audience, participants, and team. We’re delighted to be partnering with St Thomas’ Church, Clapton Common whose Garden Room will provide us with enough space for adequate social distancing as well as some lovely big windows to ensure proper ventilation. We’ll ask that you wear a mask when entering, leaving, and moving around the venue (but feel free to remove it whist seated if you wish).

Accessibility

The Garden Room is adjacent to and accessed via the church’s main hall. The main hall is accessed via a total of 8 steps with a handrail on the right side. Seating at our events is unreserved, but please contact us if having a reserved seat would be helpful to you.

Wheelchair users can access the Garden Room via a wheelchair lift located in the garden, rather than from the church’s main entrance. The lift may require assistance to operate, so please feel free to contact us in advance of the event if you’d like to arrange this, or equally please speak to any team member at the event.

There are two gender-neutral toilets in the main hall (adjacent to the Garden Room), one of which is wheelchair-accessible.

If there is anything at all we can do to help make the event as comfortable as possible for you, please contact us and we will do our very best to help both in advance and during the event.