Following an open call for applications in Autumn 2022, Kathryn (Kechi) Nwajiaku-Dahou was awarded a 2-week funded residency. Cove Park’s programme of funded residencies support research, the development of existing and new projects, collaboration, interdisciplinary practice, and the production of new work and ideas. All national and international artists, cultural practitioners, and researchers, working individually and collaboratively in all art forms, in the creative industries, and across disciplines, were eligible to apply. Cove Park’s residencies also support individuals at every stage in their careers.

Kathryn (Kechi) Nwajiaku-Dahou is a Scottish born, London raised, British-Nigerian poet and political scientist. She gained a PhD in politics from Oxford University in 2006 and has for over twenty years written and published about the creative power of narratives to generate individual and group identities and to transform lives and political fortunes, particularly in the contexts of struggles for environmental and racial justice.

After a long career in International Development and much back and forth between Europe and Africa, in 2019, she reconnected with the creative world of her childhood and adolescence in London (National Youth Theatre, performance arts), to turn scribbled down notes in hotels, airplanes and in airport lounges, into structured prose and poetry. Her first collection of poetry entitled ‘me’ (2023, Amalion) will be published later this year and she is currently working on a non-fiction narrative novel. Based in Paris, she is founder and host of the ‘Salon in my Salon’ (a politics and poetry space for writers and artists of colour to share work in progress).

Cove Park is delighted to welcome Kathryn (Kechi) to take up a two-week funded residency to further develop her non-fiction narrative for publication as a novel. The novel will explore her own trajectory – from her birthplace in Scotland, to her arrival in Nigeria, to her return to London and back, to explore questions of belonging and not belonging, of being and becoming, of coming and going. She sees her own personal trajectory as a thread in a rich tapestry of post-colonial experiences that make up a powerful collective story with could help to heal and build bridges across increasingly, disaffected, digitally disconnected, communities.

Image provided by the artist.