Nathalie will take up the role October, working on the second edition of the programme that runs biennially for three editions between 2017 and 2022 supporting a total of nine artists. Successful artists each receive £15,000 to support a year of Fellowship, during which they are matched with a core mentor and will have further access to a range of advisers and critical friends to support their developing practice.
Nathalie works across the fields of arts, activism and academia. She has run literature programmes promoting diversity in the UK for over 20 years, founding the first national mentoring and translation programmes for writers living in exile, and is the Director of The Complete Works , a national development programme that has helped to raise the number of Black and Asian poets published by major presses from less than 1% to 16% since 2005.
Nathalie is also the co-founder of Invisible Presence, a national programme developing British Latino writers and she is in the process of setting up Poetry Action, an international centre to promote diversity in poetry in partnership with Roehampton Poetry Centre. Nathalie is the founder of the first dance-poetry company in the UK, Dancing Words, specialising in producing short films that have been shown at festivals all over the world. She holds a PhD in Latin American Poetry from King’s College London, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, as well as being a Visiting Research Fellow at Roehampton University.
