Caleb Femi & Onkar Kular in conversation

25 augusti 2022, kl: 18:00
Sänds via: Vår sida på Youtube

Göteborgs Litteraturhus together with The Right to design platform and IASPIS we are very happy to present the British poet and director Caleb Femi to a Swedish audience.

On Aug 25th 2022, Caleb Femi has been invited to Göteborgs Litteraturhus to take part in a public reading and conversation around his widely acclaimed publication Poor with curator and professor Onkar Kular. The event will focus on how the combined practices of reading, documenting and writing can provide new ways, new forms and new visibilities for understanding how our designed urban environments profoundly shape individual and collective experiences at many scales.

Raised on the North Peckham estate in South London, Caleb Femi is a poet and director. His debut collection, Poor, was published in 2020 by Penguin Press. He has written and directed short films for the BBC, Channel 4, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton. A former Young People’s Laureate, Caleb won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2021) and has been shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize (2021), and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize (2021). He has been featured in the Dazed 100 list of the next generation shaping youth culture.

About Poor:
What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because ’you fit the description of a man’ – and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground?

In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives. Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: ’I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.’

To read more about Caleb Femi please see features in The Guardian & The London Review of Books

This event is presented in close collaboration with The Right to design platform and IASPIS.

Warmly welcome Thursday the 25th of August, 6 pm!

*Free admission (but seatings are limited to 80 persons)