Word of Mouth at BOV, Monday, 16 January

Bohdan Piasecki and Lucy English
Word of Mouth at Bristol Old Vic
Monday, 16 January
8.00 pm
King St
Bristol
Tickets: £8.00/6.00
Box Office: 0117 987 7877

Bohdan is a performance poet and slam host born in Warsaw, Poland, currently based in the UK, where he is putting the finishing touches to a PhD in poetry translation.

Before his move to England, Bohdan started the first poetry slam series in his country, introducing Poles to spoken word and creating a platform for a whole new generation of performers.

Bohdan has travelled around Europe (with some forays into North America) with his poetry; he represented Poland at the 2007 Poetry Slam World Cup in Paris (and was the only European poet to reach the finals), proudly wore the title of the 2008 Hammer & Tongue Oxford Season Slam Champion, and was an artist in residence at the European Poetry Slam Days in Berlin in 2009.

He has a keen interest in literary translation and ways in which it can be used in performance, and actively pursues collaborations with other poets as well as artists from fields such as photography, video, music, and dance.

Bohdan derives a perverse pleasure from inflicting poems in Polish on unsuspecting international audiences. He has a tendency to speak too much, enjoys walking, but not chewing gum, and still hopes to learn to play bass one day. He also finds writing about himself in the third person has lost a lot of its lustre since the advent of social networking sites.

Visit his website.

Lucy English was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied English and American Literature at the University of East Anglia, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

She has three novels published by Fourth Estate: Selfish People (1998), set in contemporary Bristol; Children of Light (1999); and Our Dancing Days(2000), set in a Suffolk commune in the 1970s.

She is best known as a performance poet, winning the first Bristol Poetry Slam in 1996, and going on to tour worldwide, performing her poetry at several international festivals including the Edinburgh Fringe, Austin International Poetry Festival, Wordfest, at Calgary in Canada and The Cuirt in Galway, Ireland.  Her poetry has also been published in a variety of anthologies.

In 2003 she co-ordinated the International Conference in the writing and practice of performance poetry at Bath Spa University and since then run the only performance poetry module at a UK university.  In 2006 she was artistic director of Apples and Snakes Poetry Tour, Exposed. In 2007, she was a finalist in the first BBC Radio 4 Poetry Slam.

She has toured Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and Taiwan with the British Council running workshops and performances. She has also run workshops for the Arvon Foundation and The New Writing Partnership.

Lucy English is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She was the Royal Literature Fellow at the University of Swansea from 2003-6 and the Royal Literature Fellow at the University of Cardiff Institute during 2007-08.