Event Description

Out of Eden, A Reading and Book Launch by Abigail Ottley

This will be an evening of spoken word performance and a celebration of working class women.

Penzance poet, Abigail Ottley, will read from her debut collection Out of Eden (Yaffle, 2025) supported by her publishers, Mark and Gill Connors, themselves accomplished poets and writers, and a small number of invited colleagues, each of whom will give a short reading. On either side of the interval, a short musical interlude will be provided by David Rowland, who will perform two of his own compositions, choosing songs that reflect the evening’s theme.

Out of Eden is a body of work that focuses on the strength and resilience of working class women. It draws liberally on the life experience of the women of the author’s own family and stretches across five generations. It moves from Great-Grandma Ottley and her ‘hand-mirror’ through Lillian May Rogers with her dark-eyed, ‘hawkish’ beauty, and the formidable but much-loved Nana Tilly, to Auntie Dot’, and the author’s mother.

But the author does not seek to spare herself in this warts and all examination of working class life through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even in 1952, to be born female in a working class home was no bed of roses and this book does not shy away from more painful and difficult themes. All the women who appear in these pages are real; their histories are both ordinary and remarkable. One of the aims of this collection is to keep their voices and their stories alive.