Poetry Night: "October" with Nur Turkmani and Anika Seidlitz

In conversation with Anika Seidlitz, Nur will discuss her work, and the questions and possibilities that poetry opens up.

The evening will include readings, discussion, and an invitation for audience members to share their own poems.

Copies of October will be available at the bookshop.

About the Author

Nur Turkmani is a writer and researcher from Beirut, now based in Lisbon. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The Iowa Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, October (Hajar Press, 2026), was shortlisted for the 2026 Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection at the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the 2026 PEN Heaney Prize. She is also a recipient of the Anthony Veasna So Scholarship for fiction from The Adroit Journal.

About October

October in Lebanon is heavy with memory. The euphoria of the 2019 revolution feels far away, its anniversaries marked by crisis, war and the genocide in Gaza. Across multiple Octobers, Nur Turkmani meditates on rupture, transformation and the quiet undoing and remaking of relationships during collective catastrophe. Part archive, part love letter, her debut poetry collection holds the ordinary and the extraordinary in the same breath, spanning balconies and border towns, fig trees and songs for friends, autumn light and the instinct to flee. Formally spare and emotionally saturated, October refuses both numbness and spectacle. These poems ask what it means to survive the world and still long for it; and how we hold what’s disappearing, or changing too quickly to make sense of.

About the Moderator

Anika Seidlitz holds a background in education sciences and anti-Eurocentric politics. Having studied in Berlin, Anika focuses on dismantling systemic barriers in education and hosts a podcast dedicated to uncovering the institutional impediments faced by marginalized groups within the German education system.