We’re delighted to be hosting an evening of poetry, prose and politics with two brilliant poets who have also turned their hand to fiction – Choman Hardi and Helen Mort. Choman and Helen will both be reading from their work and signing copies of their books.

About the authors:

Choman Hardi is an educator, poet, and scholar whose work is informed by an intersectional approach to inequality. She returned home after 26 years of displacement to teach English and gender studies at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS). She founded the Center for Gender and Development Studies at AUIS, which initiated the first gender studies minor in Iraq. She is the author of critically-acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) have been studied by secondary school students as part of their English GCSE curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the prestigious Forward Prize for Best Collection. It was also translated into French in 2020. A selection of her poems was published in Italian in 2017. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, her post-doc- toral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide: Anfal Survivors in Kurdistan-Iraq (Routledge, 2011) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler. Her translation of Sherko Bekas’ Butterfly Valley (ARC Publishing) won a PEN Translates Award. Whispering Walls is her debut novel.

Helen Mort is a poet and novelist. Her collections Division Street, No Map Could Show Them and The Illustrated Woman are published by Chatto & Windus. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Doors: 6.30, starts: 6.45

Tickets for this event are free but do please register your interest in advance. If you would like a signed copy of either book but cannot make the event, please contact us on 0161 274 3331 or manchester@blackwell.co.uk and we can arrange this for you.