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Adam Lowe on BBC Radio 4 for The Digital Human

Poet Adam Lowe was recently invited to speak to BBC Radio 4's programme The Digital Human. Asked about how language use is changing online to avoid filters and please advertisers, Adam speaks about how minority groups tend to suffer the most from such policing. But he also speaks about how language has always been able to mask and reveal.

Listen to the show, or download it, now on the BBC Radio 4 website.

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Peepal Tree is off to Calabash, Jamaica

Founding editor Jeremy Poynting is off to Jamaica as an invitee of the Calabash Festival at Treasure Beach. He’s scheduled to be taking part in a conversation, a “Reasoning” session with the great LKJ (whose new book Time Come: Selected Prose) Jeremy is currently reading with great pleasure) and with his long-time friend and our associate poetry editor, Kwame Dawes, whose new collection of poetry, Sturge Town, is due out in October, and then next year by the major US poetry publisher Norton.

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Launching Henry Swanzy: The Selected Diaries at Bocas Litfest

Introduction made at the launch at the Bocas Litfest on Sunday 30th April. by Jeremy Poynting

(A note: this presentation was given to a predominantly Trinidadian audience, hence its mostly Trinidadian points of reference and the fact the festival was celebrating the 100th anniversary of Samuel Selvon's birth. The diaries, of course, cover writers from all over the Anglophone Caribbean. It is also a personal piece and does not represent Peepal Tree's public views on the monarchy.)

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Join us online at The NGC Bocas Lit Fest

The NGC Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago’s annual literary festival returns this weekend, with a programme of events running from Friday 28 to Sunday 30 April. After three years of hosting a virtual, online festival, the programme is back to an in-person format, based in Port of Spain — but audiences elsewhere won’t be left out. The festival livestream — available at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest website as well as YouTube and Facebook — will make events on the main stage accessible for viewers anywhere, with no tickets or registration required.
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Marc Wadsworth at Remembering Stephen Lawrence - The legacy and way forward

Starts on Tue, 25 Apr 2023, 7pm BST (Online; free)

Thirty years ago this month, Black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs in South East London. It became an international cause célèbre after Nelson Mandela was introduced to Stephen's parents by Anti-Racist Alliance founder Marc Wadsworth. The government set up the Macpherson public inquiry into the killing that found police to be riddled with institutional racism and it proposed unprecedented reform of the Met. Have lessons been learned, and what's the way forward?

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Ira Mathur wins 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-fiction!

We are pleased to announce that Ira Mathur has won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-fiction, on an all-Trinbagonian honours list including Anthony Joseph and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo.

Ira's memoir Love the Dark Days scooped the prize for non-fiction, while Anthony Joseph won the poetry prize for Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury) and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo won the fiction prize for When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton/Doubleday).

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