Nia Davies

2025 Events

MANCHESTER
Sat 15th Feb: Peter Barlow’s Cigarette with Nat Raha & Sam Commotion, The Carlton Club, 4-6pm

SWANSEA ABERTAWE
International Women Writers’ Day event, Cultural Institute, Taliesin, 7th March, 2025, 12 – 4pm.

GLASGOW
Anthology as Manifesto: Symposium for Jerome Rothenberg: 21-22nd March 2025, University of Glasgow

LONDON
Launch of Gestures: A Body of Work, Thurs 3rd April, RCA Battersea

GUILDFORD
Surrey Poetry Festival, Sat 5th April all day, University of Surrey

HERBERT’S QUARRY, BLACK MOUTAIN, MYNYDD DU
Knitting Fog collab with Jess Lerner & Gaby Agis, May 10th 2025

MEXICO CITY
PO-EX Symposium, 17-19th September 2025, Universidad Iberoamericana

2024

On the 24th of October 2024 Bloodaxe will publish Nia Davies’s second collection of poems, Votive Mess.

You can learn more about and pre-order here from the publisher Bloodaxe’s website: Votive Mess.

LAUNCH EVENTS

21st Oct 7pm | Online, Bloodaxe Youtube
Bloodaxe Triple Launch w. Helen Ivory & Dzifa Benson

24th Oct, 7.30pm | Elysium, Swansea
Launch Party, readings & performances
With special guests: Truly Kaput & the Midnight Tremblers
and Taz Rahman, Wanda O’Connor, Jess Lerner and more tbc!

30th Oct, 1pm | Singleton Campus, Swansea University/Prifysgol Abertawe KH303
Talk for the Creative & Critical Practice Research Group

2nd Nov, all day | Tŷ Tawe, Abertawe/Swansea
Gŵyl NAWR Festival of experimental arts
A full day of experimental performance, music and poetry

Already passed but please donate
20th Sept 7pm | Elysium, Swansea
Fundraiser for children of Palestine 

About Votive Mess

In Votive Mess Nia Davies asks how time and desire move us errantly. Her second collection follows her startling debut All fours, emerging from an immersion in performance and ritual. The poems trace a path through the peaks and troughs of performance, bouncing between enchantment and disenchantment. These works are studies in the altered states of travel, masks, comedy, learning and love. Nia Davies begins to learn a lost mother tongue, y iaith Gymraeg, and presents unfinished experiments in liminality. Votive Mess is a book of small rebellions against systems of exhaustion and alienation, embracing lingual brambles and shabby theatre to assemble fragments gleaned from the rubble of Babel. There are love letters drowsy and excessive as well as uncanny happenings on stage and in the woods. Votive Mess is composed out of a tangle of sex, leaf, stumbles on stage, damage, blackberries and dyslexia. There is a discharge of Awen, otherwise known as poesis. The navel of the dream is inside out.  Nia Davies’ first full-length collection,  All fours (Bloodaxe Books, 2017), was shortlisted for the Roland Mathias Poetry Award 2018 (Wales Book of the Year Awards) and longlisted for the 2019 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. 

‘In a collection that straddles buoyancy and hesitancy, Davies courts the pleasures, mishaps and undersides of languages. Welsh, English, action, gesture, food, land, bodies, water and desire become itinerant strata in a terpsichorean poetics of intimacy. Polyphonic jouissance.’ – Amy McCauley on Votive Mess 

‘Votive Mess lights a fire in the poetic vessel, expounding and expanding Davies’s vital preoccupations that separate, and link, us all.’ – Kimberly Campanello 

‘From the phenomenology of cut-ups to the open fields of performative notation, Nia Davies’ Votive Mess documents and embraces the “anti-poetics” of ritual. Spoken from the heart of the contemporary world, yet in tones that resonate with an older ritual tradition, these poems playfully extend language towards ceremony. Votive Mess offers us a new, free-form liturgy, a liminal portal “for transmitting through multiple spaces”. Wander through these spaces – the spell won’t wear off.’ – Peter Jaeger 

‘For all their humour and disarming daftness, Davies’s poems do make space for the serious, the pertinent, the uncomfortable… Profane and charismatic, lovely and at times infuriating, Nia Davies’s poetry glitters above all thanks to its energy.’ – Leaf Arbuthnot, The Times Literary Supplement, on All fours 

‘Nia Davies’ peculiar and witty All fours is an interrogation of language and sexuality, psychoanalysis and gender, violence and the body, and the values and meaning that we assign to each. Her poetry is surprising, strange, experimental… All fours is challenging, but its content…is urgent.’ – Suzannah V. Evans, New Welsh Review

Cover artwork by Taraneh Mosadeq