Introduction to S. Niroshini and Natalie Linh Bolderston

A very warm welcome to everyone.  It’s a real joy to share these words about Natalie Linh Bolderston and S. Niroshini, whose recorded workshop with performance, interviews and writing prompts follows.  It’s captioned for d/Deaf access. Vital members of our collective, I know their works will speak across continents for decades to come – for the resonance of their subject matters, and the power and beauty with which their poems are executed. Natalie and S. Niroshini are creating this ‘Voicing Our Silences’ space around the themes of girlhood, and mother tongues, which are close to many of our hearts.

Girlhood, like adolescence, is a time of adventure and self-discovery, when we lay the foundations for the adults whom we become. To older people, it can also seem slight and insubstantial, a place of passing through, when everyone around the individual girl – or indeed boy, or non-binary child – often has a clearer understanding of the changes that are taking place in their lives than they do. 

Natalie Linh Bolderston’s and S. Niroshini’s works capture the adventure and excitement, along with the element of incomprehension by the adult world, that children and adolescents of all genders can face. They also give witness to the importance of this part of our lives, and the necessity of articulating its complexity. In their discussions around mother tongues within transplanted and migrated lives, the poems also engage with the risks of the wars and migrations that can separate peoples of all ages from their places of origins.  Both experiences shaped the poets’ families’ lives.

As their poems you will hear remind us, youthfulness further heightens the risks arising from wartime or migratory destabilisation of social structures, and of finding yourself a stranger in a strange land.  But against these potentials for loss,  mother tongues offer a form of shelter.  Within a language, a culture of origin can also be transported, and afterwards unfolded.  In Natalie Linh Bolderston’s wonderful poem, ‘Praying to Âu Cơ after My First Cervical Screening’, this transplanted culture, embedded in goddess myth, provides a place in which the speaker can find and understand her individual experience relative to the generations of women who preceded her. 

Saying a little more about Natalie Linh Bolderston first – widely published, her many moments of distinction include being placed third in the National Poetry Competition, being one of the winners of the Women Poets’ Prize last year, and being awarded an Eric Gregory grant, and of course launching her wonderful debut pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, with V. Press. 

Natalie Linh Bolderston’s work has astonished me since I first heard her read at the Creative Futures ceremony in 2018, where she won the Silver award. Like S. Niroshini, she has the ability to bring a politicised clarity of thought and research to the page, held within mythic imageries and voiced languages.  Nat’s subject matters arise from the history and cultural identity of Vietnam, and the impacts on its peoples and landscapes of the Vietnam War, including the migrations and separations which this precipitated. 

Also, like S. Niroshini, Natalie Linh Bolderston gives particular attention to girls and women, including their generative and creative bodily experiences of menstruation, fertility, and birth, but also of liability, through these, to predation and exploitation.  Both writers share an interest responding creatively to female deities, and historic figures, evolving language to particularise this.  Exploring the legacy of the  eighteenth century Vietnamese poet, Hồ Xuân Hương,  Natalie Linh Bolderston’s ‘Spring Fragrance’ captures “the dark red ache/ of orgasms”. Her ‘Map of the Economic Zone, 1978’, follows two young girls facing hunger into a wilderness, whose skies witness storms which may arise from nature or bombardment. ‘Middle Name with Diacritics’, which won Third Prize in the National Poetry Competition, and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Forwards Prizes Best Single Poem category, explores the different meanings of Linh to tell the history of Vietnam and the mother who gave Natalie its heritage as her birthright. I interviewed Natalie Linh Bolderstone about her debut The Protection of Ghosts, here.

Dislocation and loss  is also a determining force in S. Niroshini’s work, as ‘Letters to Sunny Leone’ documents.  Placed third by Ilya Kaminsky in the Poetry London Prize for 2020, the poem offers a piercing account of the disruption  of childhood migration, and its impacts on identity and the sense of self.  The sequence begins “Dear Sunny/ I want to explain to you how I lost track of my body”.  It’s peopled by stuffed toys bought in charity shops and boiled to kill germs, girls who “extend tentacles from their raw centre”, and a letter of apology for hurt done at school to the speaker – then torn up by a parent who cannot bear to read what it says. 

Hearing ignored and unnoticed voices similarly informs Darling Girl, S. Niroshini’s compelling debut pamphlet, just published by Bad Betty Press.   Breath-taking poems respond to multiple artworks, including Julia Cameron’s haunting photograph, ‘Girl, Ceylon’. Sitting alongside the original image – cropped by S. Niroshini to remove the voyeuristic recording of the child’s cracked feet –  the words call back into being the livingness of the young girl whom Cameron dressed up in pearls and then captured on film, in a slant response to the italicised comment within the text, “You asked me to write a poem about the history of indenture.” 

Like Natalie Linh Bolderston, S. Niroshini is also consistently and radically inventive with form, to tell a “much, much more tangled story”.  Enacting on the page the newness of its making, ‘Notes on Astral Theory’ uses dictionary definitions from Sanskrit and Tamil, along with phonetic pronunciations and transliterations, to question how we may realise agency in the face of history and speak through our own, and others’ voices. 

It’s now my great pleasure to hand you over to the recorded workshop, interview and performance with S. Niroshini and Natalie Linh Bolderston, whose link is below both as video and audio. Please be sure to have something to write with if you wish to follow the prompts in the writing exercises.  And above all – enjoy and celebrate the work of two astonishing poets. 

About S. Niroshini

S. Niroshini is a writer and poet based in London. She received Third Prize in the Poetry London Prize 2020 and is a recipient of a London Writers Award for Literary Fiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Good Journal, On Bodies (3 of Cups Press, 2018) and adda stories.

Born in Sri Lanka, she was educated in Colombo, Melbourne and Oxford. She studied law, art history and Sanskrit at university and practised as a solicitor before starting to write fiction, essays and poetry.

About Natalie Linh Bolderston

Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet. In 2019, she was a runner-up in the BBC Proms Poetry Competition and came third in the National Poetry Competition. In 2020, she received an Eric Gregory Award and co-won the Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize. She is a member of the Roundhouse Poetry Collective and the 2020–21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, is published with V. Press. She is now working on her first full-length collection.