In Conversation with Salena Godden

Salena Godden is a writer, poet and broadcaster who has been described as ‘the doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (Ian McMillan); ‘the Mae West madam of the salon’ (the Sunday Times) and as ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang!).
In her debut novel, ‘Mrs Death Misses Death’; Death desperately wants to share her stories, and she selects as her scribe Wolf Willeford, a genderfluid east London poet.
Death is personified as a series of black women: one minute she’s an old “homeless black beggar woman with knotty natty hair”, the next she’s a “kind black lady”, then she becomes a young, “shimmering” Nina Simone. This allows her to pass through the world incognito, because, as she points out, “there is no human more invisible, more easily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past” than a black woman.
The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction.
Salena was born and raised in Hastings, she is a tireless activist and witty raconteur.

Hastings Library
Wednesday 23 March
6.30 doors 7pm event
FREE EVENT – must be booked
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