The guy in the photo above is Mohammed Mamdani. He runs a community food bank on the St Raphael’s Estate in Brent, North West London. It’s called Sufra, a Persian word. The literal definition is of a tablecloth or rug – one you spread on the ground when people eat together. But the word also …
Author Archives: neilsbaker
“People can come together and make things happen”
[A story of mine for The London Community Foundation] The closure of their local library shocked the St James Street community. But out of the ashes they are building something incredible… In April 1997 Alison Griffin, three-months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, took a two-week holiday in Libya. When she got home, she …
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How a simple ‘what if?’ question is helping Hackney kids do better in school
[A story I wrote for The London Community Foundation…] Lots of great ideas start with a simple “what if…?” question. For Catriona Maclay, the moment came when she was talking with friends over dinner. As a secondary school teacher in North London, she’d noticed how easily young people could fall behind in their studies. Catriona …
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Writing with wu-shih
I ran a workshop at the Wise Words festival in Canterbury a couple of weeks ago. This is an excellent community arts event with an ambition to “inspire wonder and engage curiosity.” People were certainly curious about my writing with constraints session. I’d hoped that maybe eight people might turn up. Two minutes before start …
Homeless in Kingston
This is Matt Hatton. He’s the director of a small charity called Kingston Churches Action on Homelessness. As the name suggests, Matt’s group helps homeless people in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. Some of them are sleeping rough on the streets, most have no place to call home – they maybe sleep on a mate’s sofa …
Constraints liberate
Bit slow to share my news on this one, but I ran a workshop on writing with constraints as part of the Guildford Literary Festival this summer. All of the 20 tickets for the event sold, which was very pleasing. It was wonderful to see a room full of writers beavering away with their pens and notebooks, and …
THE STORY INSIDE
This is Zoe Tynan Campbell, designer at Stumped Studio. I’m writing a piece of short fiction for Fiera magazine inspired by work she is showing at the London Design Festival. Last week I popped round to her home/workshop to find out more about what she does, and why. It was also a bit of a trip down memory …
What is art for?
If you’re trying to make Art – and the capital A is deliberate – is it helpful to have some kind of end purpose in mind, some kind of idea about how your Art might be useful to the world, or even just to one person? Back in my student days I wrote a 10,000-word dissertation about the value …
Straight to the bottom
My copy of Raymond Carver’s complete poems arrived today. I opened it and read one at random, while my lunchtime bagel toasted. The Fishing Pole of a Drowned Man. What a beauty.
Economist article: Hanli Prinsloo
My article for The Economist about ocean campaigner Hanli Prinsloo (above) has just been published. Here’s how it starts… Hanli Prinsloo was jogging on a Cape Town beach when she found two girls kicking a dead dolphin that had washed ashore. It could have been a creature from a distant galaxy, for all they knew. …