Saturday 6 December 2025, 7.30pm
Join the87press for Mushaira, an evening of poetry, performance, music, food, and community. Mushaira is a live literature reading series featuring authors published by independent presses, and is rooted in South Asian tradition of poetry and community.
This edition celebrates the publication of two novels—Tetra Nova by Sophia Terazawa and Indian Winter by Kazim Ali.
Featuring readings from Sophia Terazawa, Kazim Ali (virtual), Samuel Fisher, Sunny Singh, Clare Pollard and Anthony Anaxagorou.
Enjoy DJ Will René while having a bite of Chef Yogi’s delicious vegan and vegetarian Sri Lankan cuisine.
To help our chef prepare and minimise food waste, please purchase your tickets as soon as possible. All meals will range from £10-£15 with smaller snack options also available.
As this is a Christmas Special, all attendees will receive a gift bundle from our backstock poetry titles.
Established in 2018, the87press is an Asian, LGBTQIA+, and neurodiverse led publishing collective and events curator in South London. We prioritize modernism, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and environmentalism in our print publications of poetry, fiction, and essays. Additionally, we offer educational and creative workshops, industry leading live events, and regular commissioned work with online journal of culture theHythe. Committed to equity, all authors receive fair contracts regardless of their background. As part of Arts Council England's National Portfolio, we contribute to the Let's Create project and look forward to fostering inclusive learning spaces as the only NPO in the London Borough of Sutton.
Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two award-winning chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize.Tetra Nova, her first novel was published by Deep Vellum in the US and the87press in the UK in 2025. She currently teaches poetry and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech, where she continues her practice as a performance artist.
Kazim Ali is the author of twenty-four books of poetry, essay, fiction, and cross-genre work. He has also edited an anthology of Muslim writers and books of critical writing on poets Agha Shahid Ali, Jean Valentine, and Shreela Ray, as well as translated books by Marguerite Duras, Ananda Devi, and Sohrab Sepehri. After teaching positions at various colleges including Oberlin, Davidson, and St. Mary's College of California, he was appointed Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities.
Samuel Fisher is a writer, bookseller and publisher. His debut novel, The Chameleon (Salt, 2018) was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, shortlisted for the Collyer Bristow Prize and won a Betty Trask in 2019. His second novel Wivenhoe was published by Corsair in 2022. The follow up, Migraine, was published in 2025. He co-owns Burley Fisher Books in Hackney and is a director of Peninsula Press.
Sunny Singh is a writer, novelist, public intellectual, and a champion for decolonisation and inclusion across all aspects of society.
She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Hotel Arcadia, With Krishna’s Eyes, and Nani’s Book of Suicides and three nonfiction books including A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey in the World’s Biggest Cinema, a groundbreaking study of Amitabh Bachchan for the BFI’s Film Star series, and the bestselling Single in the City: The Independent Woman’s Handbook, on lives of single women in India, , and the recent A Bollywood State of Mind: A Journey into the World’s Biggest Cinema. Her collection of short stories titled Refuge: Stories of War (and Love) was published in August 2025.
In 2017, she launched the celebrated Jhalak Prize for literature which now includes awards for Children’s & Young Adult, Poetry and Prose. She is the publisher of the bi-annual Jhalak Review. She is also a founder of the Jhalak Foundation, which focuses on a range of literary, artistic and literacy initiatives in the UK and beyond.
Sunny lives in London where she is Professor of Creative Writing and Inclusion in the Arts at London Metropolitan University.
Clare Pollard’s sixth collection of poetry with Bloodaxe is Lives of the Female Poets. Her poem ‘Pollen’ was been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Individual Poem. Clare has also recently written the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies, which won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize. She is the Artistic Director of Winchester Poetry Festival.
Will René produces and presents Plastic Language on NTS Radio, a show exploring the intersections of poetry, music and sound, and Endpapers on Noods Radio, a genre-hopping programme of music without words to listen to while reading or writing. He makes music under the name Hack Mystic and is a librarian at the Southbank Centre's National Poetry Library, where he curates and manages the sound collections.
Anthony Anaxagorou FRSL is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist and publisher. His third collection, Heritage Aesthetics published with Granta Poetry in 2022, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. It was listed as one of New Statesman’s top books of 2022.
Anthony is artistic director of Out-Spoken, a monthly poetry and music night held at London’s Southbank Centre, and publisher of Out-Spoken Press. He is the editor-in-chief of Propel Magazine, an online literary journal featuring the work of poets yet to publish a first collection and the founder and curator of WriteBack, a quarterly literary series held at the British Library.
