An enthralling evening of poetry, stories and performance by two acclaimed Caribbean writers. Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze and Sharon Millar,  who present poems and short stories and poems set in Jamaica and Trinidad.

Millar will read from her collection of stories The Whale House (Peepal Tree) which was shortlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize (Fiction category) and Breeze will read from her new poetry collection The Verandah Poems (Bloodaxe) which was published earlier this year  to mark her 60th birthday.  This will be Millar's debut in London since The Whale House was published. Event produced by Renaissance One and Southwark Libraries, with support from Peepal Tree.

Tickets free, book here 

Cited as a ‘one-woman festival’, Jean 'Binta' Breeze has presented her work throughout the world, charting the human experience through poetry and plays.  She is the author of eight books including Riddim Ravings and Third World Girl: Selected Poems. She is an honorary Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Leicester and received an MBE for Services to Literature in 2012.

‘The easy-going voice talks of personal development, celebrates friends and family, comments on mortality, freedom, gender and class.  The poet is examining, subtly, a more or less contented return to where her life began.’ Mervyn Morris, Poet Laureate of Jamaica

Sharon Millar is a Trinidadian writer who lives in Port of Spain. She was a winner of The Commonwealth Short Story Prize and a recipient of a Small Axe Short Fiction award for The Whale House (Peepal Tree). Her work has appeared in The Caribbean Review of Books, Wasafiri, Small Axe and Granta.  She lectures in prose fiction at the University of the West Indies and is writing her first novel.

‘Millar has rooted herself into a Caribbean literature where language crackles and no ethnicity, gender, economic status or race is off limits.  This book made me catch my breath..The characters barb and the language sings.’ Tiphanie Yanique