Poetry Night with the poets Christine De Luca and Mathilde Gal

Thu 17 Oct
Books & Ideas

Come to share your favourite poems in French. Don’t forget to bring your own texts, in rhyme, prose or even short stories during this evening dedicated to literary writing. Authors Mathilde Gal and Christine De Luca will be with us to share her own experience of creative writing. This event will be held in French, with the option to read your own texts in English if French is not your first language.

Bookings

Christine De Luca writes in English and Shaetlan (Shetlandic), her mother tongue. She lives in Edinburgh and was appointed Edinburgh's Makar (Poet laureate) for 2014-2017. She has had eight poetry collections published, several of which have won awards. Her most recent is Veeve (Mariscat Press, Edinburgh, 2021). She has also written two novels and several children’s storybooks.

She has participated in many festivals at home and abroad and has just returned from the Trois-Rivières International Poetry Festival, in which she also participated in 2011. Her first French bi-lingual, Mondes parallèles (éditions fédérop), won the Prix de Poésie du Salon du Livre insulaire (2007). She particularly enjoys translating classic texts for children, most recently Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Her new bi-lingual, translated by Jean-Yves Le Disez, has recently been published by Francis Boutle Publishers, London.

She has had many fruitful collaborations with musicians and visual artists. Another Time, Another Place (The Scottish Gallery, 2021) documented a collaboration with the Scottish artist, Victoria Crowe.


Social worker and activist, Mathilde Gal is the author of two self-published novels, Germes and D comme. She is also the co-author of Des vies orageuses with the collectif Tcholeiy. The book recounts the first steps of Idrissa in France as an asylum seeker and of Sarah, a young doctor fresh out of studies, working in a screening center. Throughout the story and the discovery of these central characters, others appear in bits and pieces of stories of passages, medical diagnoses, living conditions in France which bear witness to the fact that the crossing of the desert is followed by the aridity of migration policies.

London