Somebody’s Walking Over My Grave
Waking the dead – buried treasure in the poetics of the passed.
Can we create a poetics of silence that also speaks? One that has the ability to expand exponentially into a map of time, bridging the past and present? What language do the dead speak? Is it the same language as the land? If the stones could speak, what would they say?
In this way, the dead are entwined in an indefinite ecopoetic; but what might it be to define the role of the past dead within a nation-state that has been defined by colonial politicking, at a time when the ‘deathworlds’ of Mbembe’s Necropolitics grow like unrelenting, unchecked mould?
In London, death and bodies carry a significant part of her history. Perhaps visiting the dead leads us to write histories of London, poetic narratives of the land in relationship to the dead. This hybrid workshop makes itself as it goes along, allowing you the poet to fill this space we will hold together, with visits to London cemeteries and in-situ writing exercise, including taking grave rubbings and researching specific histories and topographies.
Additionally, there will be an online component to the course and you will be invited to post your work into the online portal for comment and feedback from the tutor and your peers.
In traversing these spaces of the dead, pathways to the living naturally emerge and, in addition, guidance through the labyrinth of grief, loss, and love – illuminating our own relationship to these potent human experiences.
The course will follow the below schedule, featuring 3 fortnightly in-person graveyard visits and online writing and feedback sessions in-between:
Session 1 – 17 Oct, 10.30am – 1pm (BST)
1st Graveyard Visit (Crossbones Graveyard, SE1 1TA), followed by a week of writing time
Feedback Week 1 – 24–30 Oct
Students submit new poems into the CAMPUS group
Everyone offers written feedback over the week
Session 2 – 31 Oct, 10.30am – 1pm (BST)
2nd Graveyard Visit (Hampstead Cemetery, NW6 1DR), followed by a week of writing time
Feedback Week 2 – 7–13 Nov
Students submit new poems into the CAMPUS group
Everyone offers written feedback over the week
Session 3 – 14 Nov, 10.30am – 1pm (GMT)
3rd Graveyard Visit (St Pancras Old Churchyard, NW1 1UL), followed by a week of writing time
Feedback Week 3 – 21–27 Nov
Students submit new poems into the CAMPUS group
Everyone offers written feedback over the following week.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
What to Expect
Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style’. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, then please take a look at our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image Credit: @ydlh
About Sascha Akhtar 
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Sascha A. (Aurora) Akhtar is committed to decolonial praxis in art and education. Akhtar writes short fictions, poetry, essays, and is a translator. She was a Creative Writing lecturer for six years at the University of Greenwich until 2025, when a cull of lecturers took place.
Akhtar has authored seven metaphysical poetry collections. The first, The Grimoire of Grimalkin (Salt, 2007), was released in a second edition by Prototype Publishers in 2024 and is currently available. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, translated, and performed internationally at festivals such as the Ledbury Poetry Festival, Medway Festival of Literature, Emirates Festival of Literature, Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, Avantgarde Festival Hamburg, and Southbank Centre’s MELTDOWN festival London curated by Yoko Ono.
She has been a judge for the Streetcake Prize for Experimental Writing and the Stephen Spender Prize. In 2019, Poetry Wales named ‘Poems For Eliot’ as the number one poem of the last five years and Only Dying Sparkles was featured on the Southbank Poetry Library acquisitions & at the University of Leeds Poetry By Design Exhibit in the same year.
A prose collection set in the country of her birth, Pakistan, The collection Of Necessity And Wanting, is a study of the economics of want and the politics of need in a post-colonial environment. It was shortlisted for the UBL prize for literary excellence. Akhtar’s translations of pioneering feminist writer Hijab Imtiaz “Belles-Lettres” are available on Oxford University Press. Akhtar’s latest writings whether cross-genre creative non-fiction, fiction, or poetry appear in Ludd Gang, BlackBox Manifold, Shuddhasar, Fugitives & Futurists, Deleuzine, Lucy Writer’s Platform, Storgy, The Learned Pig, Tears In The Fence, BlazeVox, Anti-Heroin Chic, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, the Prototype Annual 4, Cut-Purse (Tangerine Press, 2022), Of Myths and Mothers anthology 2022, and The Fortnightly Review. In 2019, her poems appeared in the Blackpool Illuminations and her most recent essay ‘Decolonizing the Ghazal’ was published in the Magma ‘Ownership’ issue.
IG: @sascha.akhtar
Facebook: @choisirlemotjuste
"Sascha is a brilliant tutor. Her assignments are always inspiring and deeply researched, and her feedback is insightful and respectful of the work."
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