Lucy Writers heartily invites you to celebrate the launch of What the Water Gave Us and to join our contributors for drinks, readings from the likes of Emily Midorikawa, Denise Rose Hansen, Shamini Sriskandarajah, Emma Korantema Hansen and Yen Ooi, and a short talk by Editors Elodie Rose Barnes and Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou about the making of the book.
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Sunlight on foam. Air bubbling into syllables. Tongues of fire. Tales of salt, tears and terror. These are just a few of the elements that await you in What the Water Gave Us, an exciting anthology of experimental memoir and personal poetry by women and non-binary writers from migrant backgrounds. Spanning seas and oceans, cities and countries, traversing borders and forging new geographies of feeling, our writers explore what it’s like to be of migrant heritage in a para-pandemic, post-Brexit Britain. The result is a triumphant collage of voices and experiences, languages and formal experiments that plumb the depths of migrant identity and positionality today. In telling us, therefore, of what the water has and hasn’t given them, they ask the reader, what does it give to you?
What the Water Gave Us includes beautiful original writing from Shirley Ahura, Susan Barker, Jenny Chamarette, Yvonne Battle-Felton, Selin Genc, Denise Rose Hansen, Emma Korantema Hanson, Claire Hynes, So Mayer, Emily Midorikawa, Yen Ooi, Shamini Sriskandarajah and Rojbîn Arjen Yiğit, and features a Foreword by Editors Elodie Rose Barnes and Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou and an Afterword by Jonathan Ruppin.
"Wondrous. These potent, deeply affecting pieces glimmer with beauty and vitality. Highly recommended."– Irenosen Okojie MBE, author and winner of the AKO Caine Prize for African Writing 2020 and Women’s Prize Judge 2023.
"This anthology is a wonderful feat of curation, mentorship, community, and lineage. Here, water marks an intersection that connects body, migration, and aesthetic inheritance; a continuous stream of new writing, perfect for dipping in and out of and embracing heterogeneous cultural forms." – Azad Ashim Sharma, winner of The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award 2023 and Director of the87press.
“A book that is a sanctuary for those of us who feel like we’re living mythologies; waking up not knowing how we got here, viewed like failed characters in someone else’s folk or ghost stories. I breathed a sigh of relief when I read it.” – Jen Calleja, acclaimed author of Vehicle, translator and co-founding publisher of Praspar Press.