Nottingham Light Night, now in its tenth year, has become one of the most anticipated events in Nottingham’s calendar. After the Christmas lights are down and packed away, and before the clocks leap forward into longer days and lighter nights, what better way to get through the long dark nights than lighting up the city?
We decided to join in this year, with our own special event. After the success of the ongoing Line of Light project – where a daily-changing snippet of poetry is projected onto a wall on Station Street – we got ourselves a tuk-tuk and a trio of some of Nottingham’s finest poets to bring you ‘Takeaway Poems’.
We encouraged people to climb aboard the tuk-tuk, meet the poet and tell them what you’d like to have a poem about, and with a flash of inspiration and a flourish of a pen they gave participants a personalised, utterly unique poem in the Line of Light style. These were put on a specially commissioned postcard, to take away and keep forever.
Our Poets:
Panya Banjoko is a Black-British writer of Caribbean descent whose work reflects her mixed heritage. She has been published in IC3 by Penguin and performed at the 2012 Olympic Games. She is Co-founder of Nottingham Black Archive and advocates on behalf of Black writers in Nottingham. She is also Patron for Nottingham City of Literature.
panyabanjoko.wordpress.com
Chris McLoughlin is a Nottingham based Poet and Writer. His writing focusses primarily on mental health, and enabling others to process grief through poetry. In the past year, Chris has received a Distinction in MA Creative Writing from the University of Nottingham, and was the Artistic Director of the Poetry Collective, Mouthy Poets. He has performed internationally, including Edinburgh Fringe, Germany, and the Nottingham Poetry Festival. His first chapbook, Breakdown, is available for purchase, along with more information, from pijaykin.com
Becky Cullen is a poet and Midlands3Cities PhD candidate at Nottingham Trent University, researching the relationship between poetry and time. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The North and PN Review; from January to July 2016 she was the second poet-in-residence at Newstead Abbey.
Join us: the full programme for Light Night can be found here.