Six creative practitioners working in different media have been commissioned to create new work in response to Dorothy’s life and writings to celebrate DW250.
Find out more about the artists and click through to the commissions here.
About the Artists
Ananya Rao-Middleton is a disabled illustrator and activist who survived a traumatic brain injury and is currently living with multiple sclerosis and several other hidden disabilities. She uses her work as a tool to speak truth to the voices of marginalised communities at the intersection of disability, race and gender. Through her artwork she hopes to create a sense of validation and belonging by reflecting the lived experiences of disabled people.
Daisy Lafarge was born in Hastings and studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Her collection of poetry Life Without Air (Granta, 2020) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Paul (Granta, 2021; Riverhead, 2022) is her debut novel. A short book on air is forthcoming with the Wellcome Collection.
Hannah Hodgson is a poet, writer and blogger living with a life-limiting illness. Her first full collection will be published in Spring 2022 by Seren, following pamphlets Dear Body (Wayleave, 2018), Where I’d Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow (Verve, 2021). She was a winner of the Poetry Business New Poets Award in 2021, with another forthcoming pamphlet, Queen of Hearts, and a 2020 Northern Poets Award. In winter 2021/2 she is a contributing editor for Poetry Wales.
Polly Atkin is a poet and nonfiction writer, living in the English Lake District. Her first poetry collection Basic Nest Architecture (Seren: 2017) is followed by Much With Body (Seren, 2021), supported a 2020 Northern Writers Award, and a PBS recommendation. She has also published three pamphlets: bone song (Aussteiger, 2008), Shadow Dispatches (Seren, 2013) and With Invisible Rain (New Walk: 2018). Her biography Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), is the first to focus on Dorothy’s later life and illness. She is working on a memoir exploring place, belonging and disability. In 2022 she became a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature.
Anthony Ezekiel (Vahni) Capildeo FRSL works in non-fiction, poetry, and at the crossover of visual and theatre arts, including expanded translation and traditional masquerade. Capildeo is Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York and an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford. Their eight books and nine pamphlets include Like a Tree, Walking (Carcanet, 2021) and Gentle Housework of the Sacrifice (Guillemot, forthcoming 2022). A Visiting Scholar position at Pembroke College, Cambridge supported Capildeo’s continuing work on silence around particular sets of trees.
The Bookshop Band are Beth Porter and Ben Please. They write and perform songs inspired by books, inspired by hundreds of authors from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman, and have released 13 studio albums featuring many of the authors they have worked with. They have toured extensively around the UK and abroad, from bookshops to festival main-stages, and have been commissioned by BBC Radio 3, The V&A Museum, The National Portrait Gallery and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Dorothy Wordsworth 250 