The Creative Writers’ Workshop in Dhaka is part of a literature strand of an ambitious new project called the New Silk Route which the British Council is running across the Central South Asian region. The countries participating in the project are Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Iran. The project is at an early stage and is quite a new and ambitious way of working for us. We are trying, I think for the first time, to develop a project that will run in several countries and several arts forms and which is thematically coherent.
Through the project we hope to explore the interplay between notions of the traditional and modern in local culture. We also hope, through various training opportunities for local artists and students to modernise traditional techniques and skills in the region. All events and strands of this project are being planned to weave together to form a caravan of storytelling in different forms, challenging traditional views of the region and of the UK and intermingling modernity with tradition and storytelling. Through sharing unheard stories and experience from the region with the UK and vice versa, we hope to build trust and establish working networks between the UK and Central South Asia.
The creative writers’ workshop was planned to provide the opportunity to develop your writing with the support of an experienced writer from the UK. We have already been able to select 16 emerging creative writers in the age bracket of 25-35 years and we are expecting 8 Pakistani creative writers to join this group. They are all experienced writers; some of them have publications in their credit. Some of them are promising young journalists who are working for the leading Newspapers of the country.
We are pleased to bring two established poets and creative writers to facilitate the workshop for a week. Among them http://www.matthewhollis.com/ who was born in Norwich in 1971. Ground Water (Bloodaxe 2004), his first full-length collection, was short listed for the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Guardian First Book Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. He published a pamphlet, The Boy on the Edge of Happiness, with Smith/Doorstop in 1996 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999. He is co-editor of 101 Poems Against War (Faber, 2003) and Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2000), and works as an editor at Faber and Faber. He is Writer-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust.
'Hollis writes a knowing, lyrical poetry set against a landscape of big skies and battened-down horizons. He combines worldly wisdom with more detailed, vernacular understanding to produce poems that speak with a sense of purpose and place'
Macdonald(http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth01G30M383312605484) was born in Glasgow in 1951. Educated at the University of Edinburgh, she graduated in 1972 and moved to London where she acted with the 7:84 theatre company and at the Royal Court Theatre. While she was working as an actress, she wrote her first play, When I Was a Girl, I Used to Scream and Shout, first performed at the Bush Theatre in 1984. The play won the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.
Her other plays include The Brave, commissioned by the Bush Theatre; When We Were Women, first performed at the Cottesloe Theatre; All Things Nice, commissioned by the English Stage Company and performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1991; The Winter Guest, commissioned and directed by Alan Rickman and filmed in 1997 starring Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law; and After Juliet, a sequel to Romeo and Juliet dealing with Rosalind's story after the death of Juliet, commissioned by the Royal National Theatre for the BT National Connections Scheme for young people. Her new play, The Girl with Red Hair (2003), will premiere at Traverse, Edinburgh in August 2003 and then transfer to London.
She is also the author of two novels, The Beast (1986) and Night Night (1988), and wrote the screenplay for Wild Flowers (1989) for Channel 4 Television and the BBC Radio play Sea Urchins. A further radio play, Gladly My Cross Eyed Bear, was broadcast in 1999. She wrote the libretto to Hey Persephone!, performed at Aldeburgh with music by Deirdre Gribbin.
For further information, please contact us at culture.science@bd.britishcouncil.org
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