An olympiad is a period of four years, particularly those associated with the ancient and modern Olympic Games.
Southbank Centre is a complex of artistic venues in London, England, on the South Bank of the River Thames.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes, born in the United Kingdom to parents from Ghana, where he was raised, is a performance poet, writer, publisher and sociocultural commentator. He is one of 39 writers aged under 40 from sub-Saharan Africa who in April 2014 were named as part of the Hay Festival's prestigious Africa39 project. He writes for children under the name K.P. Kojo.
Imtiaz Dharker is a Pakistan-born British poet, artist, and video film maker. She won the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry and was appointed Chancellor of Newcastle University from January 2020.
Judith "Jude" Pamela Kelly,, is a British theatre director and producer. She is a director of the WOW Foundation, which organises the annual Women of the World Festival, founded in 2010 by Kelly. From 2006 to 2018, she was Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre in London.
Akram Hossain Khan, MBE is an English dancer and choreographer of Bangladeshi descent. His background is rooted in his classical kathak training and contemporary dance.
The Asia Literary Review was a quarterly literary journal published in English and distributed internationally. It included articles of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and the photography genre. The journal first published in Hong Kong in 2000 as a small local literary journal called Dim Sum, founded by Nuri Vittachi. Later, Nuri became involved with British businessman and philanthropist Ilyas Khan, who provided encouragement and financial support for the first decade. Khan was a Hong Kong supporter of arts and together they created an international showcase for writers from the Asian region.
Big Dance was a dance initiative in the United Kingdom, which happened every three years from 2006 to 2016. It was a nine-day biennial festival of dancing, mostly taking place in non-traditional dance spaces such as museums, shopping centers, parks, bridges, stations, galleries, and libraries, with the aim of inspiring people in different ways through dance. Initiated in 2006 by the first Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, for the Greater London Authority, the programme was delivered in partnership with Arts Council England and delivered events and inspiration to be physically active through dance.
The Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF) is a free annual outdoor performing arts festival, which takes place across East and South East London (Greenwich) every summer. GDIF was founded by its Artistic Director Bradley Hemmings as an independent festival in 1996 and is produced by the charitable organisation Greenwich+Docklands Festivals (GDF). The festival organises over 200 performances during 10 days, which are attended by over 80,000 people each year.
The World Shakespeare Festival was a programme of events about William Shakespeare and his work. They took place mostly in London and Stratford-upon-Avon as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad which accompanied the Olympic Games. It was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and sponsored by the Arts Council, BP and Lottery with about 60 participating organisations including the BBC, British Museum, National Theatre and Shakespeare's Globe.
Jennifer Wong is a writer and poet from Hong Kong.
The National Poetry Library is a free public collection housed at Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre. Situated on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall, overlooking the river Thames, the library aims to hold all contemporary UK poetry publications since 1912. It houses the largest collection in Britain, numbering over 200,000 items, including works by small presses. It also holds audio and video materials, critical texts and works for children for loan and reference.
Chris Tally Evans is a Welsh disabled artist, actor, director, and writer. He was born in 1962 in Swansea, trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama as a performer and graduated from Trinity College, London, with a teaching diploma.
Paul Cummins MBE is an English artist from Chesterfield, Derbyshire, who produces landscape installations using ceramic flowers.
Kārlis Vērdiņš is a Latvian poet.
Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian-Bahamian poet, essayist and cultural critic who has lived in the Caribbean, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Trained as an academic, he was an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
HarrisonParrott is an international artist and project management agency working in the field of classical music and the arts, with offices in London, Munich and Paris. It was founded in 1969 by Jasper Parrott and Terry Harrison.
Kaite O'Reilly FRSL is UK-based playwright, author and dramaturge of Irish descent. She has won multiple awards for her work, including the Ted Hughes Award (2011) for her version of Aeschylus's tragedy The Persians. O'Reilly's plays have been performed at venues across the UK and at the Edinburgh Festival. Her work has also been shown internationally including in Europe Australia, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. O'Reilly openly identifies as a disabled artist and has spoken of the importance of "identifying socially and politically as disabled" to her work. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Mario Petrucci is a British poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge, later completing a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London. He is also an ecologist, having a BA in Environmental Science from Middlesex University. Petrucci was the first poet to be resident at the Imperial War Museum and with BBC Radio 3. He has broadcast widely on radio, including BBC Radio’s Kaleidoscope, London Nights, Sunday Feature, Night Waves, The Verb and BBC World Service, as well as on BBC TV.
Unlimited is a commissioning programme that celebrates the work of deaf and disabled artists, originally conceived for by Arts Council England for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Since its inception, the programme represents a multi-million pound investment which to date has commissioned more than 70 pieces of work across theatre, dance, visual art, music, literature, film, poetry and performance art. Several Unlimited-commissioned pieces have gone on to have a global reach, such as Sue Austin's Creating the Spectacle, which has reportedly been seen by more than 150 million people worldwide. Others have won critical and industry acclaim within their field, such as Touretteshero's Backstage in Biscuit Land, which earned the company the 2014 Total Theatre Award for Best Emerging Company. Unlimited is currently delivered in partnership between Shape Arts and Artsadmin with senior producer Jo Verrent.
