Please join us to celebrate the launch of Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail. The reading will be hosted by Jenny Lewis. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, redeemable against the cost of the book. You will receive the discount code and instructions for how to purchase the book in your confirmation email as well as during and after the event.

Register here https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_C9jYz_9ITKSCx0qHueuj2g#/registration

Tablets: Secrets of the Clay transforms the world’s first letter symbols, cut onto clay tablets, into matters of our modern everyday life. The poems are accompanied by drawings inspired by the ancient Sumerian images. These short poems, which can be read as Iraqi haiku, invoke an urgent wisdom beyond their original borders. In her author’s note, Dunya Mikhail writes: ‘At this moment, I am writing to you using tablets such as the computer or iPad or phone. If I were living in the time before writing, I would express my thoughts to you using clay tablets. I would draw my ideas the way my Sumerian ancestors used to do thousands of years ago. In fact, that’s exactly what I tried to do in this book. I imagined myself living in that time with no language, and yet had to express my poems through drawing. Not knowing how to draw was good for me because these drawings are supposed to be primitive and thus in harmony with the spirit of those simple signs in their first communication with the world. After all, those ancestors of mine were not all of them artists. I like to think that they were ordinary people who revealed themselves through symbols they inscribed on caves and clay tablets. I am fascinated by those codes because they were poetical, although unintentionally so.’

About the speakers:

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. The United Nations granted her Human Rights Watch Award for freedom of writing and Arab America listed her as ‘one of ten modern Arab writers who should make Arabs proud’. According to the Christian Science Monitor, ‘Dunya Mikhail is one of the foremost poets of our time’. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic and poetry at Oakland University in Michigan.

Jenny Lewis is a poet, playwright, translator and songwriter who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She was educated at the Royal Masonic School (Weybridge and Rickmansworth) and then at the Ruskin School of Art and, later, St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She gained an MPhil in Poetry from the University of South Wales and a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, London University where her dissertation was ‘Translating epic poetry from an unfamiliar language.’ Jenny has had seven plays and poetry cycles performed with music and dance at major UK theatres including the Royal Festival Hall and Pegasus Theatre, Oxford where she was a Core Writing Tutor for 20 years, working mainly with the flagship Pegasus Youth Theatre for which she wrote After Gilgamesh (2012) and, with Yasmin Sidhwa and Adnan Al-Sayegh, Journeys to Freedom: A Retelling of the 1001 Arabian Nights (2015). Jenny has published four collections including Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014) and Gilgamesh Retold (Carcanet Classics, 2018) which was a New Statesman Book of the Year, a LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Carcanet’s first ever audiobook. Jenny has also published three chapbooks from Mulfran Press in English and Arabic with the exiled Iraqi poet Adnan Al-Sayegh which are part of the award-winning, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ project aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. The project included collaborations with artists, musicians and film-makers; seminars and readings at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the British Museum and the Iraqi Embassy; and a song, ‘Anthem for Gilgamesh’ which has had over 100,000 hits on YouTube and Arab websites. Let me tell you what I saw, Jenny’s translation (with others) of extracts from Adnan’s work, was published by Seren in 2020. Jenny’s first poetry book, When I Became an Amazon (Iron Press, 1996/ Bilingua, Russia, 2002) was made into an opera, with music by Gennadyi Shiroglazov, performed in English by the Tchaikovsky Opera and Ballet Company in 2017 and in Russian for International Women’s Day 2023, by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Jenny’s poems, reviews and articles have been published by leading journals, including The Cork Literary Review, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Salzburg Review, PN Review, The Poetry Review and World Literature Today.