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Shazea Quraishi is a Pakistani-born Canadian poet, playwright and translator based in London. A selection of her work was included in the Bloodaxe anthology Ten: new poets from Spread the Word in 2010 and her first pamphlet, The Courtesans Reply, was published by flipped eye in 2012. The Art of Scratching, her first book-length collection, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. Her second, The Glimmer, is published by Bloodaxe in 2022. She received a Brooklease Grant from the Royal Society of Literature in 2015 and an award from the Artists International Development Fund of the British Council and Arts Council England in the same year.
Constraint, precision and technical mastery characterise this compelling and generous narrative of collective artistic endeavour. If the 'form is the measure of the obsession' then this collection is a lifelong obsession with the truth-telling nature of art. -- Sasha Dugdale * on The Glimmer * Shazea Quraishi's first collection, The Art of Scratching, reveals the poet's flair for re-imagining and feminising historical texts, and for inventing her own edgy fables of family life and childhood. -- Carol Rumens * Poem of the Week, The Guardian * There is an intriguing collision between the archaeological and the lyrical in Shazea Quraishi's series of poems, The Courtesans Reply... The props and rituals bestow on these poems an exotic otherness but the emotions they explore are timeless. -- Stephen Knight * Ten *
