Mona Arshi read for the 2019 John Hewitt International Summer School, alongside Zaffar Kunial.
Mona was born in 1970 to Punjabi Sikh parents in West London and grew up in Hounslow. She worked as a lawyer for Liberty UK, acting on many high-profile cases, including that of the right-to-die campaigner, Diane Pretty.
She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and won the inaugural Magma Poetry competition in 2011 and was joint winner in 2014 of the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her work was included in Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe 2014) and her debut collection, Small Hands (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool Press, 2015), won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her second collection, Dear Big Gods (Pavilion Poetry/Liverpool Press) was published in 2019.
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