CAPITAL LETTERS is a new bimonthly reading night on Ngnunnawal and Ngambri Country, held at the Drill Hall Gallery at the Australian National University. It features programmed writers and has two open mic slots.
Created by local editor Alice Grundy and local writer Jacinta Mulders, Capital Letters is a night for experimenting, connecting and for showcasing new creative work. Canberra is often used as a synonym for Australia’s political class, but locals know that there is a diverse population that includes artists and writers, students and academics. Intended to foster community and celebrate writing, Capital Letters invites you to come and enjoy the varied talents of local writers
5 APR
6 for 6.30 pm
Irfan Master is a novelist and poet. His work has been translated into ten languages. Irfan has lead writing workshops at Arvon and for the British Council in the UK, Europe and India. He has contributed numerous short stories to anthologies, collaborated with artists, photographers and musicians, contributing poems and prose for books and exhibitions and worked on stage adaptations of his work. He previously taught Creative Writing at London Metropolitan University. Irfan is currently a judge for the Jhalak Prize in the UK.
CJ Bowerbird is a spoken word artist, physical performer and 2012 Australian Poetry Slam Champion. In 2018, he released Beyond This Blue, a recording of the show he created with the Downfall Choir for the 2017 National Folk Festival. He combines words and clumsy movement as part of the Sound & Fury Ensemble in Canberra, ACT.
Jacinta Mulders writes short stories and essays. She has an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia in the UK, granted under full scholarship. Her writing has been published locally and overseas and in 2022 she was shortlisted for the Stinging Fly / FBA Fiction Prize. With Alice Grundy, she co-runs Capital Letters and is a current Visiting Fellow at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU.
Jean McNeil has published fifteen books, spanning fiction, memoir, poetry, essays and travel. She is Professor of Creative Writing and directs the programme at the University of East Anglia in Norfolk, UK. Her account of being writer-in-residence with the British Antarctic Survey in Antarctica, Ice Diaries, won both the Adventure Travel and Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival in 2016. She also collaborates with visual artists and has curated two international exhibitions on the Anthropocene, in Barcelona, Spain in 2020, and forthcoming in Andorra in June 2023.
Theodore Ell is an Honorary Lecturer in literature at ANU. His poetry collection Beginning in Sight was published in 2022 and his poetry and criticism have appeared in Best of Australian Poems 2022, the Australian Book Review, PN Review and The Canberra Times, among others. Theodore won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize for 'Façades of Lebanon,' a memoir of surviving the 2020 Beirut port explosion. For Capital Letters he will read from a new book that tells the full story of his years in Beirut.