Blog
Digital Poetry Slam Champion
The winner of Open the Door 2020’s Digital Slam is Jenny Lester! Open the Door’s first spoken word event was brought to life by this year’s four shortlisted poets, who have christened our first Digital Slam with the most engaging display of word-skills we could have wished for. From fantastically elemental women via explorations around […]
Calm Slam Winner and Runner-Up
Discover the winner and runner-up of the first ever GWL Digital Calm Slam.
Nan Shepherd Prize
The Nan Shepherd Prize team offer advice on nature writing, submitting books to agents, and opportunities to get your writing noticed.
Gillian Burke on Wangari Maathai – “Eco”
By Gillian Burke ENVIRONMENTALISM is a movement tied up in multiple knots of complicated science, a shared concern for our shared home. The word ‘eco’ has become so overused that it’s almost lost its meaning. Eco is derived from the Greek word ‘oikos’ which simply means home. Home. The most beautiful word I know. Like […]
Gillian Burke on Wangari Maathai – Environmentalism
By Gillian Burke ENVIRONMENTALISM is a white, middle-class privilege. I hear this a lot. This is the fourth post in my takeover series about Professor Wangari Maathai who was a Kenyan political and environmental activist, and the first African woman recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Professor Maathai was the founder of a tree-planting […]
Gillian Burke on Wangari Maathai – Far from Home
By Gillian Burke WHAT would it have been like for the young Wangari Maathai? Her home was a colony under British Rule that, by the late 50s, was brutally suppressing the Mau Mau independence uprisings and restricting the freedom of her Kikuyu people. With this as a backdrop, and having just turned 20, she earned an […]
Gillian Burke on Wangari Maathai
GILLIAN BURKE is a natural history television programme producer and presenter, and a voiceover artist. She has been a co-presenter of the BBC nature series Springwatch and its spin-offs since 2017. As part of Open the Door 2020’s celebration of conservationist and activist Wangari Maathai, here Gillian explores her connections to Wangari and Kenya, and […]
Flup Rio Poetry Slam
In October of last year I was extremely lucky to be one in a small team to travel to Flup Festival of the Peripheries in Rio de Janeiro, alongside the poet Courtney Stoddart, representing Scotland in the Flup International Slam, and Tomiwa Folorunso, who was producing a series of podcasts interviewing some of the different and awe inspiring voices the festival invited to participate.
Black Activism and Movement Building: Perspectives from Brazil
I have written a little bit about our trip to Flup Festival in Rio de Janeiro a previous blog [link] and particularly it’s poetry slam, but I wanted to acknowledge another important aspect of the festival, that it was a gathering that brought global Black activists into dialogue with the specific context of Brazil, home to the largest Black community beyond the African continent, but often a blindspot in English speaking histories of African Diaspora.
GWL + FLUP: The Poetry Slam Podcast
The poetry slam at FLUP feels like the heart of the festival. In this final episode of Glasgow Women’s Library and FLUP the podcast, Tomiwa Folorunso finds sits down with one of the founders of FLUP, Julio Ludemir and some of the poetry slammers to find out more about this special event.