At The Reading Cure event in the beautiful surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London yesterday more than 70 people from health and mental health services, libraries,homelessness organisations and publishing companies, as well as interested writers, journalists, counsellors and an architect joined us to hear about the power of reading groups, and eat cup cakes.

Andrew McCulloch and Jane Davis

Jane Davis (Director, TRO) read ‘Crossing The Bar’ by Tennyson, showed photos demonstrating the huge range of people coming to reading groups, and shared some experiences of the impact of reading on children, vulnerable adults and firefighters; Lindsey Dyer (Director, Service Users and Carers, Mersey Care NHS Trust) talked about the learning and understanding she’s gained from books (particularly Laurie Lee) and why she commissioned Get Into Reading at Mersey Care; Dr David Fearnley (Medical Director, Mersey Care NHS Trust) told us about his group in a secure psychiatric unit at Mersey Care and their enjoyment of stories by Anton Chekov, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie.  Andrew McCulloch (Chief Executive, Mental Health Foundation) worked hard to keep the speakers to time, allowing the audience to get involved and ask questions, and at the end lots of people stayed around to ask more questions, share their enthusiasm and desire to get reading groups happening in their organisation.  Get Into Reading London has truly arrived!

Speaking at the event will be:

• Dr Andrew McCulloch, Chief Executive, Mental Health Foundation
• Jane Davis, Director, The Reader Organisation
• Dr David Fearnley, Medical Director, Mersey Care NHS Trust (RCPsych Psychiatrist of the Year 200)
• Lindsey Dyer, Director of Service Users and Carers, Mersey Care NHS Trust

The event has sold out and we’re hoping that this will mean big things for Get Into Reading London, so watch this space… the Reading Revolution is growing!

The Mourning Tree: an autobiography and a memoir of prison, by Mohamed Barud Ali

Kayd Somali Arts and Culture in collaboration with redsea-online.com is proudly inviting you to the presentation of new book: Weerane (The Mourning Tree), autobiography by Mohamed Barud Ali. Join them to discuss this new autobiography with the author and also mark and commemorate with us, the students protest (20 Feb 1982, erupted 28 years ago in Hargeysa) demanding justice and the release of UFFO members.

This prison memoir will not only give first-hand information of the experience of the brutalities of Siyad Barre’s Somalia but also of the life of a nomad child who is brought to the city to live with his aunt because there was no work for him due to the fact that his father did not own any camels to be looked after. In the city while growing up, hunger was never far away. That motivated Mahamed to perform well at school which gave him the opportunity to go to the United Kingdom.  After he earned his university degree, he went back to his home town Hargeysa where he met young professionals’ like him. They decided to volunteer for their community, what became to be known by the international community as Hargeysa Self-help group and locally as UFFO. For their noble acts, Mahamed and his colleagues were imprisoned and what followed were eight long lonely years, where the studying of insects was the main entertainment of the day.  The reasons why they were freed, while at the same time the rest of their community had been destroyed, were as strange and surprising as the reasons why they were jailed in the first place were bizarre. There was no time in Mohamed’s life to get depressed or discouraged when he and his group were freed as the reconstruction of the country had to start immediately.

The other speakers are Jama Musse Jama; director of Red Sea online (publisher of The Mourning Tree), Rashiid Sheikh Abdullahi; Author  and expert on Somali culture,  Martin Hill; the former director of Amnesty International Somalia desk and researcher who was involved in this case, Judith Gardner; author Somalia–the Untold Story: The War through the Eyes of Somali Women, Adan Warsame Said; the author’s friend and fellow prisoner, Fawzia Yousuf H Adam; The Director of Raad, I.M Lewis; Emeritus  professor at The London School of Economics and Political Science (TBC) and others…

The Mourning Tree: an autobiography and a memoir of prison, by Mohamed Barud Ali is the first of “Rag & Dumar” series, which is a selected list of biography books, published and distributed by Ponte Invisibile Ed.

Mahamed Barud Ali is civil right activist, Hero to some, the prisoner of conscience under the brutal regime of Somalia; he lives in Hargeysa, with his wife and children and works on issues relating to human rights and civil liberties.

Join us to discuss this new autobiography with the author and also mark and commemorate with us on Saturday, 20 Feb. 2010, 4pm at Oxford House, Derby Shire Street, E2 6GH. For more information call 07903712949; or email: ayan_mahamoud@kayd.org; website: www.kayd.org

Duffy, who was made poet laureate last year, told the BBC:

Like everyone else, I was very deeply affected by reports from Haiti about the earthquake and its aftermath, and I just thought to myself ‘this is going to take years to put right’. These people will need support for a long, long time to come.

Liverpool poet Roger McGough and recent contributer to The Reader magazine,  Andrew Motion, will be taking part, as well as Jo Shapcott, John Agard, Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke and many others.

Poetry Live for Haiti will be held at Central Hall, Westminster on Saturday, from 2.30pm. It is hoped the event will raise £20,000 for the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Haiti Earthquake Appeal.

This special event, held at The Whitechapel Gallery in East London to coincide with their exhibition ‘Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’, will be the first time these translations are read in public.

For more information visit The Poetry Translation website.

24 – 26 February 2010

National and international experts will host a series of seminars to review current knowledge and discuss the importance of Health Literacy (HL) in the UK. Seminars will be interactive, with speakers and the audience reviewing current knowledge and the relevance and importance of HL in UK health, education and society.  Sessions will be recorded and proceedings of the conference will be published.

Cost: £50 ($84) per day (or £120 ($200) for all 3 days)

For more information, directions and a booking form: email Alison or Saffron on info.esu@lsbu.ac.uk tel: 020 7815 6934/44 or visit our website: www.lsbu.ac.uk/enterprise

After piloting The Poetry Society’s slam championship in Liverpool last year, SLAMbassadors UK is now nationwide and coming back to the city for more beats and rhymes. Running in partnership with BBC Blast in 2009, The Poetry Society’s centenary, this is the chance for all 13-19 year olds to take part in a workshop that could see them meeting performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah and performing live in London in the Autumn!

Young people nationwide have been taking part in slam poetry workshops with The Poetry Society’s team of performance poets. They are encouraged to write a 60 second piece around the theme of identity, perform their poem/rap to camera, then are uploaded to the BBC Blast website to be entered into the SLAMbassadors UK competition. In November, six lucky acts will be invited to attend a workshop in London with internationally renowned performance poet Benjamin Zephaniah and poet and SLAMbassadors Mentor, Joelle Taylor. They will then perform at a prestigious London venue and receive ongoing support from The Poetry Society.

On Saturday 12th September, The Poetry Society is running two workshops with kind support from the Bluecoat, for young people aged 13-19. Liverpool poet Nikki Blaze and SLAMbassadors Co-ordinator Joelle Taylor will run sessions at the Bluecoat to help you start slammin’. See our website for more information.

For more information, please call Bea Colley on 020 7420 9894 or to book your place, email: blast-liverpool@bbc.co.uk. If you would like to bring a group of young people along, please get in touch. I would be very grateful if you could pass this information on to any young people you think may be interested and do let us know if you would like us to send some flyers for you to hand out.

‘Song on a May Morning’ is taken from Milton’s volume of 1645 Poems: a collection written in a variety of genres, and including some of his more famous work such as ‘Lycidas and Comus’. This particular poem celebrates both the youth , innocence and ‘mirth’ that is generally associated with the coming of Spring, and the  ‘blessing’ of new life and colour that the month of May provides us with. The image of dawn breaking in the first two lines of the poem emphasises the start of a new time in life: the coming of the ‘flowery May’.

Song on a May Morning

Now the bright morning-star, Day’s harbinger,
Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her
The flowery May, who from her green lap throws
The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.
Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire
Mirth, and youth, and warm desire!
Woods and groves are of thy dressing;
Hill and dale doth boast thy blessing.
Thus we salute thee with our early song,
And welcome thee, and wish thee long.

John Milton, 1645

Noted literary scholar and Editor of The Reader magazine Philip Davis and renowned psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discuss the enduring appeal and impact of Victorian literature and realism today. They ask why the authors and characters remain so popular and argue for the relevance of Victorian literature to contemporary society, and for its powerful evocation of human purpose, morality, secularization and belief, human stories and living in time.

Philip Davis is the author Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (2008), Editor of The Reader magazine and Professor of English at the University of Liverpool.

Visit The Reader Bookshop for a list of books by Philip Davis and Adam Phillips.

Tickets for the event cost £8 (£6 concessions). To book, call 020 7942 2211 or visit the online booking page.