Sanctuary: There Must be Somewhere

Angela Graham, along with five other poets, who are ‘expert’ in Sanctuary, have collaborated to to create the collection Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere (Seren Books, 2022)‘Moon’ from Iran; Csilla Toldy is from Hungary and knows what it is like to have been a refugee; Phil Cope is a specialist in sacred sites; Viviana Fiorentino is an economic migrant from Italy working with asylum seekers and Glen Wilson imagines confrontation on the Mexican border and acted as a mentor for Angela’s work. 

Safe, sacrosanct, holy… Endangered, violated, profaned… We live between these tensions. We want to be open; we fear being overwhelmed. Our planet, our politics, our personal lives… 

The Sanctuary Tree will be located at The Crescent throughout the Festival. The collective invite you to add your hope, prayer, plea or resolution to the tree. Click here for more information. 

Angela Graham is a distinguished producer for TV. She was Development Producer on the BBC series The Story of Wales presented by Huw Edwards (2 BAFTA Cymru Awards). She was producer and co-writer of the Oscar entrant cinema feature Branwen (6 BAFTA Cymru nominations and Best Film at the Celtic Media Festival). Her short story collection A City Burning (Seren 2020) was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her poems have been published widely in journals such as The North, Poetry Wales, The Interpreter’s House, and often anthologised, most recently in Local Wonders and Words From The Brink and A470. 

Phil Cope is a poet, writer and photographer from the Garw Valley, Wales and is an expert on the holy wells and shrines of the British Isles. His book The Golden Valley: A Visual Biography of the Garw (Seren Books) has just been published. In the pipeline is his book, The Living Wells of Ireland.

Moon is the pseudonym for an Iranian poet. He lives in Wales and says of himself, “I am Moon, a wanderer who was wandering around the outside world to find Sanctuary but found it inside himself. “

Viviana Fiorentino is poet and novelist, s an economic migrant from Italy now living in Northern Ireland who is a social activist with migrants and prisoners of conscience. She teaches Italian literature and her poems have appeared in anthologies including Writing Home (Dedalus Press) and Days of Clear Light, and in Italy, her poems, short stories and translations have appeared in international literature magazines including Nazione Indiana, FourXFour NI, Poethead, The Blue Nib and the Honest Ulsterman. She co-founded two activist poetry initiatives Sky, You Are Too Big and Letters With Wings and Le Ortique.

Csilla Toldy is a Filmmaker and poet, who fled communist Hungary for a ‘free’ life in the West. Now living in Northern Ireland, her writing has been supported by British Screen, Media and Northern Ireland Screen, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and National Lottery. Her scripts have won the Katapult Prize and The Special Prize of the Motion Pictures Association as the Hungarian winner of the Hartley-Merrill Prize. In 2019 she was quarterfinalist at the Big Break Competition of Final Draft. Her film Belfast Exposed recently won Best Street Art Film at the Berlin Underground Film Festival. Lapwing has published three poetry books: Red Roots- Orange Sky 2013, The Emigrant Woman’s Tale ( with Fil Campbell musician) 2015 and Vertical Montage 2018. 

Glen Wilson is a poet who work has been widely published including The Honest Ulsterman, Iota and The Paperclip, amongst others. He has had work commissioned by the Irish Football Association and has appeared on Sky Sports. Glen’s work has also appeared on the Poetry Jukebox in Belfast and Paris. He won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing 2017, the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award in 2018, The Trim Poetry competition in 2019, and just recently in 2021 won the Slipstream Poets Open Poetry competition. He is currently working on his second collection of poetry for which he was awarded a SIAP grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.