Gwenno

22 Jul 2023 7.30-9pm

Overview

Join sound artist and singer Gwenno for an immersive evening of music, language, poetry and film.

Between appearances at Bluedot Festival and Latitude Festival, Gwenno and her band come to the Queen Elizabeth Hall for this special show as part of Poetry International.

Gwenno is performing work from all of her albums, including 2022’s Tresor, which was selected as a BBC 6Music Album of the Year and shortlisted for the 2022 Mercury Prize.

This event begins with a screening of the film, also called Tresor, which Gwenno made to accompany the album.

Most of the songs on Tresor are sung in the Cornish language Kernewek, a critically endangered language spoken by a few hundred people. ‘When will you hear me?’ Gwenno sings in track six, ‘Ardamm’ – ‘When will you understand me?’

Gwenno’s father, the renowned poet Tim Saunders, is also performing a short set of Cornish language poetry before the music begins.

Tim Saunders is a Cornish language poet who also writes poetry and journalism in the Welsh, Irish, Breton and Cornish languages. He lives in Cardiff but is of Cornish descent. He is a bard of the Gorseth Kernow, a literary historian and editor of The Wheel – an anthology of modern poetry in Cornish, 1850 – 1980.

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