Shalmika Sivakumar is a creative writing graduate (MA, Nottingham Trent University) and an aspiring educator who loves finding romance hiding in mundane moments and turning them into stories. She’s currently writing her debut romance novel, Peach Soda, and reaches for poetry whenever inspiration or a good trip away catches her off guard.
Since moving to Nottingham, she’s found her creative home through Speak Easy, which has kept her close to her writing roots. Two years as social media intern for Nottingham Poetry Festival taught her to tell stories across every kind of media and she’s since grown into her role as Speak Easy’s Comms Coordinator. She’s happiest working behind the scenes!
Nottingham has shaped Shalmika as much as she’s grown alongside it, through festivals, workshops and unforgettable little moments of people coming together. That sense of belonging is exactly what draws her to the Youth Advisory Board: she’s keen to learn how events are built from the ground up, get stuck into the ideas and everything in between that helps creating a space where young creatives feel welcome, connected, and part of something bigger as she does.
Shalmika Recommends:
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library – Michiko Aoyama
This is a book about book recommendations, so it felt right to put it first. Five people in Tokyo, each a little stuck, visit a small community library, and the librarian hands each one a book they never would have picked for themselves. Every time, it turns out to be exactly what they needed. It’s gentle and hopeful, and it reminds me why I want to teach: sometimes the right book at the right moment changes everything.
Villette – Charlotte Brontë
Lucy Snowe moves alone to a foreign city with almost nothing, and ends up teaching at a girls’ school. I love how quiet and guarded she is, and how much she feels under the surface of what she’s willing to say. Brontë writes loneliness, stubbornness and starting over in a new place so honestly that it still feels modern.
The Women of Troy – Pat Barker
We all know the story of Troy, but Pat Barker tells it from the women left in the Greek camp after the city falls, through Briseis’s eyes. They’re the voices the old stories skipped, and she gives them anger, humour and a quiet kind of courage. It showed me how much power there is in retelling a story from the side that’s usually silent.
The Summer I Turned Pretty – Jenny Han
Beach houses, long summers, and the ache of first love: Jenny Han writes growing up so tenderly. Belly’s summers at Cousins Beach are full of the small, ordinary moments where romance actually lives, and that’s exactly what I try to catch in my own writing. It’s the book I’d hand to anyone who thinks YA romance is “just” romance.