Global Conversations: A Poet's Music
Award-winning poets Nathalie Handal and Kayo Chingonyi share music and poetry
If we think of meter as kin to the metronome, the line-ending suitor to a singer’s signature phrasing, it becomes clear that poetry has always danced with music. A Poet’s Music celebrates this relationship unashamedly, bringing together two of the world’s finest contemporary poets – Lannan Foundation Fellow, Nathalie Handal and Dylan Thomas Prize winner, Kayo Chingonyi – to share their work and have a conversation around music and what it means to them and their poetry. The conversation will feature music chosen by the writers and a playlist will be released after the event.
Nathalie Handal
Raised in Latin America, Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, playwright, translator, and editor originally of a Palestinian family from Bethlehem. In addition to Latin America, she has been educated in, and has lived in, Asia, Europe, the Arab world, and the United States. Nathalie is a professor at Columbia University, a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome and she writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders. Widely acclaimed for her writing both as essayist and poet, Nathalie holds an MFA in poetry from Bennington College and an MPhil in drama and English from the University of London. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses, as well as the recent Life in a Country Album.
Kayo Chingonyi
Kayo Chingonyi was born in Zambia in 1987, and moved to the UK at the age of six. 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 was a Burgess Fellow at the Centre for New Writing, University of Manchester, and 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. His latest book is A Blood Condition.
Global Conversations
Curated specially for a festival that loves conversations in a time that limits face-to-face meetings, Global Conversations focuses on the conversations that some of the most creative minds of our planet have been dying to have with people who live far away from them. From the minutiae of mundane tasks to the importance of resistance, in a range of languages, but always human, this is a space to expand the mind. Take a look at more Global Conversation events:
