The Writers of Wales Database

HARRIS, MAGGIE

Email: maggie729@btinternet.com
Website: http://www.maggieharris.co.uk/

Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and after living in Kent, moved to Carmarthenshire in 2006. A poet and a prose writer, her first two poetry collections are Limbolands and From Berbice to Broadstairs, both from Mango Publishing, www.mangoprint.com. A third, After a Visit to a Botanical Garden, was published in 2010 by Cane Arrow Press. Individual poems have been published by Poetry Wales, The ShoP, Hafan, Calabash and Agenda amongst others, and short stories have been included in anthologies including Virago/littleBrown (Short Circuits), University West Indies (Poui), Mango Season, Urban Fox Press and Wasafiri. Performance poems for children are available on a cd Anansi Meets Miss Muffet, (East England Award).

She won the Guyana Prize for Literature 2000 for Limbolands (Mango, 1999). Other prizes and bursaries include TS Eliot at Kent University, Kent’s Outstanding Adult Learner 1994, South–East and East England Arts Council Awards (including Year of the Artist and awards for new writing), Leverhulme Research Abroad award (1999), Barbados, and Meridian TV for recorded poetry. A short story ’Red Gloves Waving’ was short–listed for the Asham Award. She was also awarded a Fellowship at Southampton University, and won 2nd prize in the 2008 Kingston University Press Life-Writing Competition for her second memoir Being Caribbean in Carmarthenshire (work in progress).

Maggie has worked on projects for several organisations including Arts Councils, Creative Partnerships, Glyndebourne Opera and The South Bank Centre, and organised a Live Literature Festival in East Kent from 2003-5. Recent appearances have included Swindon Festival Of Literature, Birmingham Children’s Book Festival, The Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, Broadstairs Folk Week and Newfoundland Festival. Workshops have included Creative Writing at the Glynn Vivian and Swansea’s Young Writing Squad. Residencies include Muse, Representing Kent in Europe, Broadstairs Folk Week Poet, Poet at Saga Building, Architecture Week.

She has workshop experience with both adults and children. Her 'Anansi Meets Miss Muffet Writing' workshops for children and young people offer a blend of Caribbean and British themes adaptable to age group. Aims include: celebrating creativity from around the world, promoting understanding of cultural issues, strengthening language skills, reading, debate, writing and performance. Maggie is a Member of Academi.

Reviews:

"…Maggie's poems dart like hummingbirds: vivid, precise, lyrical, playful and singing with a chorus of voices. This collection brings colour and life to the greyest winter's day…"
Maggie Butt

"…This is a subtly orchestrated collection, telling of journeys and arrivals and dispersals; the epic of Caribbean reality. The poems are at times powerful and moving, at other times witty and tender, and always absorbing…"
Abdulrazak Gurnah

 
Selected Publications:
Poetry:
Limbolands (Mango Publishing, 1999) (www.mangoprint.com/)
From Berbice to Broadstairs (Mango Publishing, 2006)
After a Visit to a Botanical Garden (Cane Arrow Press, 2010)

Cassette:
The Limbowalkers
CDs:
Listen to de riddum
Anansi meets Miss Muffet (for children, East England Arts Award)

Prose:
Kiskadee Girl  (Kingston University Press, 2011)


Contributed to: 
Short Circuits (contributor) (Virago/littleBrown, 1996)
Sixty Poems for Haiti (co-editor) (Cane Arrow Press, 2010)



From Berbice to Broadstairs (Mango Publishing, 2006)

In this new volume of poems, Maggie Harris continues to examine the ever-evolving relationship between her childhood in Guyana and her adulthood in the UK. The resulting poems stride across timescales and landscapes displaying the selfhood of a poet who carries her child-country on her shoulders.

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, please click on its front cover


 

Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:

1. Available for workshops and performances in schools, from primary upwards
2. Creative writing workshops and talks for adults 
3. Speciality: Caribbean and Black British writing, performance, migrant culture, creativity, writing in dialect, cross-art forms, life writing and the natural world, in particular plants and gardening

AGE RANGE: Primary and adults

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS: non-car driver