Poet Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo

Monday 4 December
1 – 2 PM

University Chapel, West Quadrangle, Main Building Gilmorehill Campus, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ
Free & Open to the Public

Vahni Capildeo is an award-winning poet born in Trinidad and living in the UK.

Her poetry collections include No Traveller Returns (2003), Undraining Sea (2009), Dark and Unaccustomed Words (2012), Utter (2013), Simple Complex Shapes (Shearsman, 2015), Measures of Expatriation (2016), which won the 2016 Forward Prize.

Selecting Measures of Expatriation for the Forward Prize, the judging panel chair Malika Booker stated, “We found a vertiginous excitement in the way in which the book grasps its subject: the sense of never quite being at home. This is poetry that transforms. When people in the future seek to know what it’s like to live between places, traditions, habits and cultures, they will read this. Here is the language for what expatriation feels like.” In an interview with the Forward Arts Foundation, Capildeo discusses the sources for Measures of Expatriation’s “sense of coexistent distance-in-presence, presence-in-distance, which is so typical of virtual communication today but also of how travellers carry elsewhen as well as elsewhere in their heart.”

Capildeo collaborated with writer and theater artist Jeremy Hardingham on a Shakespeare-engaged performance, a process she describes as “part of an ongoing project relating text to movement in new ways.” She has also collaborated with poet, artist, and journalist Andre Bagoo. Capildeo has served as a contributing editor for the Caribbean Review of Books and as an editorial assistant and a researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary.

Books by featured authors will be for sale in John Smiths bookshop.

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