Natasha Carthew
Natasha Carthew is an award-winning writer and performance poet from Cornwall. Her work goes deep beneath the core of what it is to live in rural UK today, exploring subjects such as social isolation, poverty, nature and environmental issues.
Central to Natasha's work as a writer and performer is to talk about Re-wilding the novel, getting lost in nature and writing outdoors for inspiration and freedom, either in the fields and woodland that surround her home or in the cabin that she built from scrap wood.
Carthew has written extensively on the subject of Wild Writing and Working Class issues for publications including the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook, BBC Radio 3 & 4, Eco-fiction, TripFiction, The Guardian, The Big Issue and the Dark Mountain Project. She has written two books of poetry and four acclaimed novels all published with Bloomsbury and is represented by Lutyens & Rubinstein Literary Agency.
For the State of Emergency Commissions, Carthew presents Act Up, a performance poem that deals with the concept of freedom, asking not just what freedom is but why it’s important for mental, physical and creative health.
We know that something is "free" if we can change it easily and it’s not constrained in its present state, most of us in the western world are used to living without undue or unjust constraints and the impact has been immense. Freedom is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty and although we must abide and obey the rules, my poem explores how we, through creativity and the freedom of the mind, have been able to free ourselves from the physical constraints and stretch our imaginations in ways that perhaps before lockdown we could not envisage.