Three South Asian poets, Sweta Srivatava Vikram, Shanta Acharya, and Shazea Quraishi, will be appearing at the Bush theatre, Shepherd’s Bush, London, on Saturday 3 November, from 7-8.30pm as part of the South Asian literature festival running until 11 November.  

Sweta Srivastava Vikram was born in India, and spent her formative years between India, North Africa, and the United States. She is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, two collaborative collections of poetry, a novel, and a full-length collection of poems due to be published next year.

Shanta Acharya is the author of five collections of poetry. Her latest is Dreams That Spell The Light (Arc Publications, 2010). She was elected to the board of trustees of the Poetry Society in the UK last year.

Shazea Quraishi was born in Pakistan and lived in Canada and Spain before moving to London. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and journals in the UK and US including Ten (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), the Financial Times, Poetry Review, and  Modern Poetry in Translation.  Since 2010, she has worked with English PEN as a creative writing tutor in refugee centres and prisons, and also teaches Improving English through Creativity, a programme she developed, at a refuge for South Asian women. Her long poem sequence, The Courtesans Reply, is to be published as a pamphlet by flipped eye publishing.