Empire Cafe Project

The next meeting of the Glasgow Colonial and Postcolonial Group will be on Tuesday 19 November 2013 at 5pm in the Seminar Room in Lilybank House, Bute Gardens, University of Glasgow. All welcome.

This session will be led by Louise Welsh and Jude Barber who will be speaking about their Empire Café project, which is part of the Commonwealth 2014 Cultural programme. The café will explore Scotland’s involvement with the North Atlantic Slave via tea, coffee, sugar and cotton. It will host a series of associated events and commission themed poetry from Commonwealth poets. The Empire Café will be based in the Briggait (home of the Merchant’s Steeple) in Glasgow’s Merchant City for seven days in July 2014 (24th July – 1st August). It will host a series of debates, academic papers, literary readings, films, workshops, art installations and discussions all themed around Scotland and slavery.

Speaker biographies:

Louise Welsh is the author of five novels, The Cutting Room (2002), Tamburlaine Must Die (2004), The Bullet Trick (2006), Naming the Bones (2010) and The Girl on the Stairs (2012). Her new book, A Lovely Way to Burn will be published by John Murray in April 2014. She has written many short stories and articles and presented over twenty features for BBC Radio. She has also written stage plays and libretti for opera including Ghost Patrol (music by Stuart MacRae) the production of which won a Southbank Award and was shortlisted for an Olivier Award (2013). Louise was writer in residence for The University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art between 2010 and 2012. She has received many awards and international fellowships, most recently an honorary fellowship from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme.

Louise worked with Jude Barber of Collective Architecture on Merchant City Voices (2012) a series of soundworks exploring Glasgow’s relationship with the North Atlantic Slave Trade. Merchant City Voices won a Scottish Design Award.