Votive Mess

Nia Davies is a poet experimenting with performance, embodied practice, intermedia and hybrid writing. She is also a writer, researcher, performer and literary curator. She was editor of Poetry Wales from 2014 to 2019, and has worked on several international and collaborative projects such as Literature Across Frontiers, Wales International Poetry Festival and Wales Literature Exchange. Her poems and essays have been published and translated widely and she has appeared in several international festivals. A frequent collaborator with other poets and artists, she co-curated Gelynion, a Welsh Enemies project on collaboration in contemporary poetry in Wales in 2015. Her pamphlets, Then Spree (Salt, 2012), Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words (Boiled String, 2016) and England (Crater, 2017), were followed by her first book-length collection, All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize for a distinctive first book of poetry. Her second full-length collection Votive Mess is published by Bloodaxe in 2024. Other publications include Interversions (Poetrywala, 2018) with Mamta Sagar, Roid Rage (2019) with Rhys Trimble, Ooze Disco (forthcoming) with Amy McCauley, and a handmade miniature art book Key Blank from the Literary Pocket Book (2018). Oceanik – a poem with video work by Lucia Sellars was winner of Outstanding Poem and Poetry Impact award from the Film and Video Poetry Society, 2018. She was recently awarded a doctorate for research into poetry and ritual at the University of Salford.