short story writer, jazz poet, performer, workshop leader, member of Black Arts Alliance.

This website contains booking details, project information and examples of work.

Forthcoming:

Performances of Liverpool's Evolving Words group. Watch these spaces: Evolving Words website

Featuring: Alexei Sayle, Dinesh Allirajah, Valeria Parrella, Pawel Huelle, Adam Kaminski, Peppe Lanzetta, Claudia Parman, Artur Becker, Murathan Mungan, Hatice Meryem, Jean-Claude Izzo and Christian Garcin.

The six European port cities known as the Cities on the Edge - Liverpool, Bremen, Gdansk, Istanbul, Marseilles and Naples - share a history of dissent, diversity and economic reinvention. Once gateways to the world, bringing wealth and innovation to their respective nations, they�ve long been maligned and misunderstood by their compatriots, preferring instead to look outwards, towards the sea - to the possibilities of change, of travel and of rebirth. 

Featuring short stories by twelve acclaimed writers from the Cities on the Edge, ReBerth explores these landscapes of change - the social tensions, the scars of war and economic decline, the attempts at regeneration, and the startling and sometimes unsavoury secrets of how these cities' inhabitants thrive and survive.

The short story Items 1-17, hitherto seen only in performance, will be published in Orbis #145, the Liverpool issue, in December 2008. GBP4.00.
For further information, join the Orbis facebook group by clicking HERE or the site for Kudos, its sister publication, HERE.

Featured in Write On Liverpool photographic exhibition and sound installation at Liverpool Central Library (William Brown Street).

photo credit: Leila Romaya & Paul McCann

Write On Liverpool: 7^th November 2008 -31^st January 2009

A photographic and audio installation, which celebrates Liverpool�s rich literary heritage, reveals personal audio dialogue alongside intimate portraits of thirteen established Liverpool poets taken at locations across the city.

This collection gives an insight into the works and lives of some of Liverpool�s most renowned contemporary poets presented by artists Leila Romaya and Paul McCann.

Poets include: Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Roger McGough, Paul Farley, Dave Ward, Levi Tafari, Deryn Rees Jones, Jamie McKendrick, Gladys Mary Cole, Dinesh Allirajah, Michael Murphy, Matt Simpson and Eleanor Rees

Launch Event and Reading at Picton Reading Room, Liverpool Central Library, 7^th November 2008, 2.30-4pm.  Free, but ticketed event please contact Leila@straycatmedia for further details.

 Supported by Capital of Culture and Arts Council, England

Now available:

Ed. Maria Crossan & Eleanor ReesI

ntroduction by Eleanor Rees

Featuring:
Beryl Bainbridge, Brian Patten, Clive Barker, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Ramsey Campbell, Paul Farley, Margaret Murphy, Dinesh Allirajah, James Friel, and Tracy Aston.

A baby blown out of an upstairs window by a WWII bomb lives to hear others tell the tale�

A woman embarks on a long-term obsession with a city landmark, abandoning her lover for the Liver�

A bricklayer working on the foundations of a never-built cathedral becomes its evangelist, its full splendour soaring only in his mind�

Bringing together fiction from some of the city�s most celebrated writers, The Book of Liverpool traces the unique contours that decades of social and economic change can impress on a city. Set against key historical moments from the Second World War to the Capital of Culture year, these stories question what �belonging� and �home� mean in the Liverpudlian context, from the regenerated city centre to satellite suburbs, from the sparring cathedrals to the no-go concrete housing estates. Liverpool emerges in these short stories as a city in constant flux: haunted by ghosts, buoyed up by myths, and shifting with an ebb and flow like the Mersey itself.

photo by Tim Power

For further details and to order a copy online, click here

"Dinesh Allirajah's story, A Different Sky...deftly connects the buying up of the city centre in the 90s with the first Gulf War." (Emma Unsworth,  Liverpool.com article)

Liverpool Daily Post feature

A Manner Of Speaking

OUT NOW - click on photo for details

Maps and Metaphors: writings by young writers from Bangladesh and United Kingdom [British Council Bangladesh ISBN 984-32-3342-5]  

'Out of Transformation' - Liverpool poetry in the 21st century essay by Peter Barry, in Writing Liverpool - essays and interviews (eds. Michael Murphy and Deryn Rees-Jones, Liverpool University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84631-074-4) 

Available on-line

Readings of Dirty Feet On The Saint and Microdrama (both taken from A Manner of Speaking), recorded 19/10/05 at Cornerhouse, Manchester as part of series organised by Comma Press. Click here for audio.

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