Supporting Alinah Azadeh, Writer-in-Residence at Seven Sisters Country Park
Alinah Azadeh is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Seven Sisters Country Park and the Sussex Heritage Coast (Seaford to Beachy Head), commissioned by South Downs National Park Authority. We support Alinah as a writer and as a partner as she leads We See You Now (WSYN), a landscape and literature project dedicated to evoking the trans-global imaginary of that coastal area, through new stories and poetry, across audio and print.
Alinah is developing a new body of mytho-poetic, speculative writing, including using overlooked heritage & colonial traces as starting points to consider our relationship to belonging, migration, deep time, climate loss & justice. This will launch as an audio series across the landscape, alongside the curated work of writers from the WSYN cohort.
We See You Now ongoingly hosts cohorts of Black & writers of colour to come into direct, collective experience of the Seven Sisters landscape, through writing and walking retreats, using the rich metaphors within this iconic coastline to explore migration legacies, belonging, loss, climate change, biodiversity and renewal – and to imagine more equitable futures. Read more about them here.
Alinah’s writer residency podcast, The Colour of Chalk, takes listeners on a walk across the landscape with a guest writer from the WSYN cohort, to read their work and explore how their relationship to the coastal landscape has been shaped by their identity, upbringing and sense of belonging – a central part of the project enquiry.
We See You Now is funded by South Downs National Park Authority & Arts Council England through a major project grant 2021-22. Writer Retreats are produced by Writing our Legacy.
