From Page to Heart: Unlearning with Freya Shi & Edward Adonteng

Expect conversation, reading, friends, garden, fresh air, good vibes, and drinks from your favorite neighborhood delicatessen I T A L O.

Grab your paperback copy of Unlearning, to Love at the event and Freya will sign it for you!

Unlearning, to Love: An Academic's Memoir on Truth, Meaning, and Spirit is Freya's debut book exploring how we move from intellectual burnout to embodied, meaningful living. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part spiritual guide, it weaves together critical theory, astrology, psychotherapy, somatics, and spirituality to show how personal healing is inseparable from collective liberation. Details here.

Freya Shi (she/they) is a writer, poet, art practitioner, holistic wellbeing facilitator using astrology, tarot, meditation, and critical theory in service of collective liberation. Having lived across two oceans, three continents, and four languages as a neuroqueer migrant of ESEA heritage, Freya’s work centers care, transformation, and worldbuilding. A 2026 Barbican Young Poet and a 2024 British Council Venice Biennale Fellow, Freya's writing has appeared in Afterall and Moving Discourse, and they write the newsletter where critical and spiritual thoughts meet. Unlearning, to Love is Freya's debut book.

Edward Adonteng is an essayist, poet, grower and researcher from South London. Published as a Contemporary Ghanaian Poet (Contemporary Ghanaian Writers Series 2024), his poetry explores themes of time, identity and humanity, as well as a reckoning with self. He was made a Barbican Young Poet in 2025 and has been longlisted for the Forward Prize. His work has been published in CING Magazine and Make it Plain. He is currently working on his debut collection.

I T A L O serves as an urban oasis in London, focusing on community connection, natural wines, and high-quality food. The shop is in the heart of historic Bonnington Square, one of the longest surviving experiments in urban living in Europe. Many of the young idealists who squatted the neighbourhood in the late 1970s and 1980s still live here, and are often to be found hanging around, and shooting the breeze...