Andra Simons is a Bermudian writer, director and actor now residing in London.
Born in Bermuda, Simons graduated from George Brown Theatre School in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was well known in the spoken-word movement in Toronto, notably for his collaboration with Sandra Alland in the performance poetry-music band Stumblin' Tongues. In 1997 Simons returned to Bermuda, where in 1999 he co-founded Waterspout Theatre company. [1] He settled in the UK in 2004, and now focuses on poetry and performance. [1]
His first volume, The Joshua Tales, was published by Treehouse Press [2] in 2009, and features collagraphs by Kendra Ezekiel. The work describes the relationship between a poet and another figure, Joshua, who can be seen as a little boy or the poet's shadow, and is set on the fictional island of Pocaroja. [3] One reviewer, on Goodreads, called the book "startling, shocking and brilliant. Indeed mysterious and magical (and controversial)". [4]
Simons was selected to represent Bermuda in "Poetry Parnassus", an international gathering of poets at London’s Southbank Centre in June 2012, featuring one poet from each of the 204 nations competing in the 2012 Summer Olympics. [5]
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor.
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, resigning in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly gay poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Anne Michaels is a Canadian poet and novelist whose work has been translated and published in over 45 countries. Her books have garnered dozens of international awards including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. She is the recipient of honorary degrees, the Guggenheim Fellowship and many other honours. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, twice shortlisted for the Giller Prize and twice long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Michaels won a 2019 Vine Award for Infinite Gradation, her first volume of non-fiction. Michaels was the poet laureate of Toronto, Ontario, Canada from 2016 to 2019, and she is perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces which was adapted for the screen in 2007.
Patricia Penn Anne Kemp, better known simply as Penn Kemp, is a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and sound poet who lives in London, Ontario. Kemp has been publishing her writing since 1972 and was London's first poet laureate, serving from 2010 to 2013.
Patience Agbabi FRSL is a British poet and performer who emphasizes the spoken word. Although her poetry hits hard in addressing contemporary themes, it often makes use of formal constraints, including traditional poetic forms. She has described herself as "bicultural" and bisexual. Issues of racial and gender identity feature in her poetry. She is celebrated "for paying equal homage to literature and performance" and for work that "moves fluidly and nimbly between cultures, dialects, voices; between page and stage." In 2017 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Sir Simon Keenlyside is a British baritone who has performed in operas and concerts since the mid-1980s.
Chrystos is a Menominee writer and two-spirit activist who has published various books and poems that explore indigenous Americans's civil rights, social justice, and feminism. Chrystos is also a lecturer, writing teacher and fine-artist. The poet uses the pronouns "they" and "them".
Priscila Uppal was a Canadian poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright.
Sir Simon Russell Beale is an English actor. He is known for his appearances in film, television and theatre, and work on radio, on audiobooks and as a narrator. For his services to drama, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace in 2019.
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.
Royall Tyler is a scholar, writer, and translator of Japanese literature. Notable works of his include English translations of The Tale of the Heike which won the 2012 Lois Roth Award, as well as The Tale of Genji which was awarded the Japan-US Friendship Commission Translation Prize in 2001. Tyler's first book of poetry was published in 2014, entitled A Great Valley Under the Stars, and his published collection of poetry, Under Currockbilly which recounts his life during the year 2014, suggests he has spent periods of his life in France, Japan, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.
Michael Arthur Gilkes was a Caribbean literary critic, dramatist, poet, filmmaker and university lecturer. He was involved in theatre for more than 40 years, as a director, actor and playwright, winning the Guyana Prize for Drama in 1992 and 2006, as well as the Guyana Prize for Best Book of Poetry in 2002. He was also respected for his insight into and writings on the work of Wilson Harris.
Sandra Alland is a Glasgow-based Scottish-Canadian writer, interdisciplinary artist, small press publisher, performer, filmmaker, and curator. Alland's work focuses on social justice, language, humour, and experimental forms.
Michael Yechiel Ha-Levi Horovitz was a German-born British poet, editor, visual artist and translator who was a leading part of the Beat Poetry scene in the UK. In 1959, while still a student, he founded the "trail-blazing" literary periodical New Departures, publishing experimental poetry, including the work of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many other American and British beat poets. Horovitz read his own work at the 1965 landmark International Poetry Incarnation, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, deemed to have spawned the British underground scene, when an audience of more than 6,000 came to hear readings by the likes of Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other, jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker.
Caroline Bird is a British poet, playwright and author.
Johannes Anyuru is a Swedish poet and author.
Zorras were a multimedia performance troupe based in Edinburgh, Scotland from 2007–2013. They emerged from the city's alternative poetry and music scenes in 2008, and performed at some of the most renowned international counterculture locations and events. Zorras were part of growing queer, LGBT, feminist and disabled / crip cultural movements in Scotland, and instrumental in raising awareness of disabled and D/deaf access in LGBTQ+ and arts communities. They created artworks that explored issues of language, sexuality, gender, race, class, mental health and disability.
Sandra Djwa is a Canadian writer, critic and cultural biographer. Originally from Newfoundland, she moved to British Columbia where she obtained her PhD from the University of British Columbia in 1968. In 1999, she was honored to deliver the Garnett Sedgewick Memorial Lecture in honor of the department's 80th anniversary. She taught Canadian literature in the English department at Simon Fraser University from 1968 to 2005 when she retired as J.S. Woodsworth Resident Scholar, Humanities. She was part of a seventies movement to establish the study of Canadian literature and, in 1973, cofounded the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL). She was Chair of the inaugural meeting of ACQL. She initiated textual studies of the poems of E. J. Pratt in the eighties, was editor of Poetry, "Letters in Canada" for the University of Toronto Quarterly (1980-4), and Chair of Canadian Heads and Chairs of English (1989).
The 2012 Cultural Olympiad was a programme of cultural events across the United Kingdom that accompanied the 2012 Summer Olympics and 2012 Summer Paralympics.