Race, Positionality, and Women's Voices: A Transnational Conversation

This event will feature readings from forthcoming literary publications (Fight of Black Swans by Laura Fish and Fitzroy North 3068 by Yvette Holt) and conversations on Australian First Nations, British-Caribbean and transnational writing on race, positionality and women's vocies with Yvette Holt, Laura Fish and Ananya Mishra.

Yvette Henry Holt heralds from the Bidjara, Yiman and Wakaman Nations of Queensland. A multi-award-winning poet, academic, editor, and national facilitator of First Nations literature globally. Yvette has lived and worked in the greater region of the Australian Central Deserts for some twelve years and worked in fields of economical literacy, financial environmental modelling, sustainable employment market and participation, governance & analysis throughout Central Australia.Her creative literary works have been published and translated in numerous languages — journals, and anthologies nationally and internationally over more than two decades. Yvette's first published collection of poetry titled Anonymous Premonition (UQP 2008) won the David Unaipon Queensland Premier Literary Award 2005, RAKA Kate Challis Award 2010, Victorian Premier's Indigenous Literary Award 2010, Scanlon Poetry Prize NSW 2008.Yvette's next collection of poetry titled Fitzroy North 3068 will be published by Upswell Publishing in March 2025. Fitzroy North 3068 follows the shadows and entrails of Holt's powerful psychoanalytical comings and goings of Melbourne's inner-city 'burbs.

Dr Laura Fish is an award-winning author. She is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing Programme at the University of East Anglia (UEA 2002), and holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing (UEA 2007). The University of East Anglia's Creative Writing Course, founded by Sir Malcolm Bradbury and Sir Angus Wilson, is regarded as being among the most prestigious in the U.K. Laura is a Fellow of the Iowa International Writers' Programme. She has held posts as a Creative Writing tutor at the University of St Andrews, University of Western Cape, UEA, and Newcastle University, where she was the Research Council (RCUK) Academic Fellow in Creative Writing 2007–2013. She is currently Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, Northumbria University. U.K University of the Year 2022 Times Higher Education (THE) Awards.

Selected Publications

⬧Lying Perfectly Still, third novel, won the S I Leeds Reader's Choice Award 2022 and took third place in the S I Leeds Judges’ Award Lying Perfectly Still by Laura Fish | flyonthewallpress

⬧ “The Other Side of Me: Moving Words into Motion,” Fish, L. (lead author) and Pavey, L., 1 Mar 2021, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, 14, 1, p. 109-123

⬧Angry Black Birds short story (Kwani? Kenya 2015)

⬧Strange Music, second novel (Jonathan Cape 2008; Vintage, 2009) was Orange Prize Listed 2009; International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award nominated, 2009; selected for Pearson Edexcel's Black British Writing A level reading guide 2017/18; and is taught on university courses internationally Strange Music (penguin.co.uk).

⬧Flight of Black Swans (London: Duckworth 1995) is set in Aboriginal Australia and received very favourable reviews in The Guardian, Evening Standard, and Times Literary Supplement.

Dr Ananya Mishra is a Lecturer in Global Race Studies at School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. She has a PhD in English from University of Cambridge where she completed her thesis titled Evidence and Sustenance in Transnational Indigenous Literatures. Her paper "The Crisis in Metaphors: Climate Vocabularies in Adivasi Literatures" is published inTransmotion (2022). She co-founded Untold Histories Museum Tours at Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), University of Cambridge; a case study on the tours is published in Communicating Archaeology: Case Studies in the use of, and engagement with, archaeological collections, Society for Museum Archaeology (2021). She is the co-founder of Bread Theatre and Film Company (Cambridge and London), an experimental arts and performance collective.

Host or Publisher Postcolonial Seminar Series, Queen Mary University of London