From 5pm to 7pm
Free entrance

Caribbean Dinner after 7pm (booking recommended)

The authors will read excerpts from new unpublished pieces as well as from their published works including Reinhold’s debut novel Lote and Raha’s book of sirens, body & faultlines.

Shola von Reinhold is a writer and actress based in Glasgow. LOTE is her first novel.

Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the “Bright Young Things,” the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the ’20s and ’30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the ’30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda’s “Escapes” through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured”

Dr Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work is of an experimental queer lyric, attending to the everyday of marginalised lives, hirstories of struggle and resistance to racial capitalism, of humans and more-than-humans. She works through de/re/materialising sound, form and syntax, on the page and in performance.

She is the author of three collections of poetry including of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018) and countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013). Recent anthologies featuring her work include 100 Queer Poems, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics and ON CARE. Recent creative and critical writing has appeared on Poem-a-Day, and in Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), Transgender Marxism (Pluto Press, 2021), Third Text, TSQ, and Wasafiri Magazine. Nat is co-authoring a book Trans Femme Futures: An Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds with Mijke van der Drift.

This event has been supported by the Year of Stories 2022 Community Stories Fund. This fund is being delivered in partnership between VisitScotland and Museums Galleries Scotland with support from National Lottery Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players.