Poets Mona Arshi and Zaffar Kunial read from their work.

Poets Mona Arshi and Zaffar Kunial read from their work.

Mona Arshi was working as a lawyer when, in 2008, she began to write poetry. Her debut collection, Small Hands, was published last year and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is the Poetry Mentor on the Arvon Jerwood Mentoring Scheme 2016-17. Fellow poet George Szirtes has praised Arshi’s work for its “extraordinary keenness, sharpness, poignancy and precision”. Zaffar Kunial was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2014, and in the same year published a debut pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series. This was praised as achieving “a balance and wholeness that few debut publications manage”. Introduced by the poet Fiona Sampson, Director of the Roehampton Poetry Centre, our co-hosts for this event.

Recorded on: April 18, 2016
Recorded at: London School of Economics