Mona Arshi
I am a poet, novelist and essayist. I practiced as a Human rights lawyer at Liberty before I started writing poetry. I worked on a number of high-profile legal cases including the Stephen Lawrence case and Diane Pretty. I also regularly represented women fleeing violence in homes particularly those from ethnic and minoritized communities as well as vulnerable refugees.
I began a master’s at the University of East Anglia completed in 2010 and completed this (with a distinction). My debut collection ‘Small Hands’ was published in 2015 and won the Forward Prize for best first collection in 2015. I have also won the Magma, Troubadour and Manchester creative writing competitions. My work has been performed at over 40 festivals both in the UK and abroad. My poems and interviews have been published in The Times, The Guardian, Granta, The Feminist Review. My work has also appeared in The Harvard Review and POETRY in the US, in The Times of India, and my poem ‘This Morning’ was also placed on trains across the London Underground.
My practice includes collaborating with various artists including musicians, filmmakers and digital artists. I was commissioned to write a programme on the Odyssey for ‘Book of the week’ for Radio 4, which was broadcast in March 2017.In 2020 I was appointed poet in resident at Cley Marshes in Norfolk. This was a project brought together by the University of East Anglia and Norfolk Wildlife Trust resulting in a sequence of poems being transformed into a digital installation. https://www.mutiny.org.uk/shifting-lines/. In 2025 poems from my third collection Mouth were performed by actor Indira Verma at the Brighton Festival. In 2022 I was appointed Fellow Commoner in Creative arts at Trinity College, Cambridge (2022-2024).I am fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Book Publications
Small Hands published by Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press) 2015
Dear Big Gods published by Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press) 2019
Somebody Loves You published by And Other Stories 2021
Nature Matters :Vital Poems from the Global Majority (eds by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf) published by Faber and Faber 2025
Mouth published by Chatto, Penguin 2025
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
Cheryl Frances-Hoad was born in Essex in 1980 and received her musical education at the Yehudi Menuhin School, the University of Cambridge (where she was awarded a double 1st for her BA in Music and a distinction for her MPhil in Composition) and Kings College London (PhD, Composition). Her music has been described as "like a declaration of faith in the eternal verities of composition” (The Times), with "a voice overflowing not only with ideas, but also with the discipline and artistry necessary to harness them” (The Scotsman).
Chosen to be a featured composer on BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week (Five under 35, March 2015), her works have garnered many awards, from the BBC Lloyds Bank Composer of the Year award when she was just 15 to more recently The RPS Composition Prize, and three Ivor Novello (formally BASCA) British Composer Awards.
Cheryl has released six celebrated CDs. Magic Lantern Tales, her disc of vocal music (featuring Nicky Spence, Sophie Daneman, Mark Stone and Sholto Kynoch amongst others) has been highly praised: "the longer you listen to this beautifully crafted CD (…) the deeper you fall under its spell” (SWR2 Treffpunkt Klassik, Germany), "Frances-Hoad’s Magic Lantern Tales disorientate and delight in equal measure.” (Opera Today). Her first portrait disc, a 2011 CD of chamber works entitled The Glory Tree, was selected as Chamber Music Choice by BBC Music Magazine.
Recent projects include Your servant, Elizabeth, commissioned by the BBC Proms for the Platinum Jubilee Prom on 22nd July 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall. The work, which paid homage to both Queen Elizabeth II and William Byrd, was picked by Ivan Hewett in The Telegraph as the highlight of the 2022 Proms season: “like all the best “classical music”, it was fresh and surprising, yet rooted in tradition, and gave plenty of hope that an embattled art form has plenty of life in it yet”. Cheryl was composer-in-residence at Presteigne Festival 2019 and was Associate Composer at Oxford Lieder Festival from 2019-2021: her half-hour song cycle, everything grows extravagantly, written with poet Kate Wakeling was premiered by baritone Marcus Farnsworth and Libby Burgess in 2021 at St. John the Evangelist, Oxford and was chosen as one of the five best classical events of 2021 by Richard Morrison for The Times. Future projects include a horn concerto for Ben Goldscheider and the Britten Sinfonia and a piano concerto for Emmanuel Despax and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
"Someone should commission a music theatre piece from Cheryl Frances-Hoad: this disc reveals a dramatic instinct straining at the leash." Helen Wallace, BBC Music Magazine, on You Promised Me Everything (CD)
“…the vocal line has an epic quality, as if drama and expression are pared down to the bare bones. There is a frightening intensity in sections such as ‘Then his rage’: the rhythmic and melodic hairs are all on edge…This composition makes one long for a full-scale operatic work from Frances-Hoad." Claire Seymour, Opera Today, on Beowulf
"[It's] quite the best piece of its type I’ve heard. I saw the War Requiem at English National Opera – this wiped the floor with it. It’s such an interesting piece and it’s so exciting to discover a composer who really understands A) how to write for the voice but B) how to use that with orchestra so that it’s not smothered by great big sound – and does drama! She knows how to write drama."
David Benedict, BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review on Last Man Standing
War Prize by Mona Arshi
From the Mouth of Chryseis,
During the first war in my infancy
the women wanted to brand me.
Children become displaced, they said,
they need their fathers’ mark on their body.
My father the holiest man of course forbade it.
I was special.
Of all the people in the kingdom
why would a prophet’s daughter need a signature?
In the war I was taken, a prize
thrown to a man who smelled of his daughter’s
ghost-litter, guilt through his pores.
I clawed at my arms, I bit my fists.
Every morning I wanted to voice something
but no shape was made from my boneless tongue.
I screamed inside that violet patch,
deep in the centre of my belly.
During that long war there was blood
on the beaks of wrens,
there was nothing
to kill for anymore, there was
nothing to pray for.
I have my own son now born from that time,
I have not named him.
He does not know what he is yet.
In between my breaths, I watch him,
look, he is toying with the worms,
his fierce eyes bright as studs.
Through the temple smoke I observe
his perfect toes in the dust,
unbranded and open to the elements.
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Unbranded and open to the elements,
his perfect toes in the dust.
Through the temple smoke I observe
his fierce eyes bright as studs.
Look, he is toying with the worms
in between my breaths, I watch him.
He does not know what he is yet,
I have not named him.
I have my own son now born from that time;
nothing to pray for,
to kill for anymore,
there was nothing
on the beaks of wrens.
During that long war there was blood
deep in the centre of my belly.
I screamed inside that violet patch,
but no shape was made from my boneless tongue.
Every morning I wanted to voice something,
I clawed at my arms, I bit my fists.
Ghost-litter, guilt through his pores,
thrown to a man who smelled of his daughter.
In the war I was taken: a prize.
Why would a prophet’s daughter need a signature?
Of all the people in the kingdom
I was special.
My father the holiest man of course forbade it.
I had no need of fathers mark on my body.
Children become displaced, they said.
The women wanted to brand me-
during the first war, in my infancy.
Lament by Cheryl Frances-Hoad (click on title for link to Youtube)