Billy-Ray Belcourt & Mary Jean Chan: Words Will Set You Free

Tired of living out their days through the eyes of others, two of international poetry’s best disruptors turn to language for liberation in tender new collections that carve a space for love amongst the creeping violence of the everyday.

Parsing through the remnants of Canada’s colonial brutalities, award-winning First Nations poet Billy-Ray Belcourt returns with the genre-bending NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field. An avant-garde mix of radical poetics and haunting confessional, it hurtles through the discursive boundaries imposed on queer and Indigenous bodies.

Moving east, London’s Mary Jean Chan recently became the youngest-ever recipient of the Costa Poetry Prize with Flèche: a sensuous poetic sequence with a title that plays on the duality of her experience as one of Hong Kong’s champion fencers, caught between defensive poses and intimate desires.

Join two refreshing poets whose work shimmers with defiant beauty, in conversation with writer and critic Jay G Ying, co-founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network.

This is a live event, with an author Q&A.