We are pleased to welcome the Zimbabwean poet Togara Muzanenhamo back to the bookshop in this joint event with Nottingham Creative Writing Hub. He read here in our first year and another full house is expected.

Set in the twentieth century, Virga, his new collection, features historical events woven together by the weather. From the spiritual silence of a sundog during the 1911 Japanese Antarctic Expedition, to the 1921 World Championship chess matches in the Cuban heat, to the final hours of a young Bavarian mountaineer in the Bernese Alps in 1936 and strange white clouds decimating whole villages in northern Cameroon in 1986 – the poems capture stories of a rapidly evolving century beneath an ancient, fragile sky.

Togara was born to Zimbabwean parents in Lusaka, Zambia in 1975. He was brought up in Zimbabwe, and then went on to study in The Hague and Paris. He became a journalist in Harare and worked for a film script production company. His work has appeared in magazines in Europe, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and was included in Carcanet’s anthology New Poetries in 2002. He has published three collections of poetry, Spirit Brides (2006), Gumiguru (2014), and most recently Virga.

Togara will be joined by Rebecca (Becky) Cullen, a Five Leaves regular!  Rebecca will be reading from her Live Canon collection A Reader’s Guide to Time. Kirsten Irving said: I really enjoyed the blocking of this collection into varieties of time, from psychological windows to era-sized fossils, in forms we recognise and in new varieties that Cullen names along the way.

Also reading, two talented poets from Nottingham Trent: Teresa Forrest (MA Creative Writing) and John Oberholzer (BA Creative Writing)

£3 general admission or Free to NTU students and staff as this event is produced in partnership with the university.

Please register via eventbrite.