ICA | Artists

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Strange Echoes

Olivia Douglass is a British-Nigerian writer and poet. They are the author of Slow Tongue, a verse/lyric-essay hybrid that responds to M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks. Their writing appears in publications including Bath Magg, Nothing Personal, Prototype 2, and they wrote the foreword for Away With Word vol.4. A Barbican Young Poets Alumna, Olivia has been commissioned by the National Poetry Library (London) and Galleria Duarte Sequeira (Portugal), alongside curating reading rooms for Passa Porta Festival (Brussels) and Nottingham Contemporary. They have held residencies with Talawa Theatre Company and Theatre Peckham, been shortlisted for the Rebecca Swift Foundation’s Women Poet Prize 2020, and in 2021 was longlisted for a Jerwood Compton Poetry Fellowship. Douglass’s writing is concerned with articulating alternative visions of liberated Black queer experiences, away from colonial frameworks. They are currently working on a debut poetry collection.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a Tobago-born unembedded poet, essayist, novelist, playwright and independent scholar who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto where she practised law for seven years before becoming a poet and writer. Among her published works are the seminal She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks; the speculative prose poem Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence; the young adult novel, Harriet’s Daughter; the play, Coups and Calypsos, and four collections of essays including her most recent collection, BlanK. Her book-length poem, Zong!, is a conceptually innovative, genre-breaking epic, which explodes the legal archive as it relates to slavery. Zong! was named the 2021 winner of World Literature Today’s 21 Books for the 21st Century.

Among her awards are numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, including the prestigious Chalmers Award (Ontario Arts Council), the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award (Outstanding mid-career artist), as well as the Pushcart Prize (USA), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba), the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA), the Arts Foundation of Toronto Writing and Publishing Award (Toronto), and Dora Award finalist (Drama). Her fellowships include Guggenheim, McDowell, and Rockefeller (Bellagio). She is an awardee of both the YWCA Woman of Distinction (Arts) and the Elizabeth Fry Rebels for a Cause awards. She has been Writer-in-Residence at several universities and a guest at writers' retreats. M. NourbeSe Philip is the 2020 recipient of PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She is also the 2021 recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ lifetime achievement award, the Molson Prize, for her ‘invaluable contributions to literature’.

Olivia Douglass. Image courtesy Theodorah Ndlovu

M. NourbeSe Philip