Well, hello there, and I hope that we have all have managed to recover from the festivities of the new year. We're back, and this post dives deep into a subject that I strongly believe in from the bottom of my heart - a creative writing workshop on writing about cities with Elena Medel, which took place on the 26th of January 2026 from 10:30am to 3:00pm at the British Library in London. As is customary of each and every blog post of this nature, I shall start by giving some introductions as to who is Elena. Elena Medel is an award-winning Spanish poet and writer, who started writing her first poem, My First Bikini (Mi primer bikini) in 2001, before going on to write a couple more poems over the years (including Chatterton, which won the Loewe Young Poets prize in 2014), and eventually getting around to releasing her first novel, The Wonders ( Las Maravillas) in 2020, which was translated into 15 languages, and released to positive acclaim from a wide range of journals and publicat...
It's been quite dead on my blog since the last post on the tales of creative writing, and that's because I have been busy in London's big library - so to celebrate the end of the 2025, let's explore the Secret Maps exhibition together and bring the mysteries of mapping alive... The Secret Maps Exhibition So, as is usual in blogposts about events, let's talk about what this exhibition is all about. So, Secret Maps is an exhibition that explores mapping and the theme of secrecy and privacy, ranging from 14th century ideas to the present day, taking place at the British Library from the 24th of October 2025 to the 18th of January 2026. The map curators at the Library had a very tough task over the previous three years in preparing the exhibition for display; choosing the right themes for the exhibition and having to meticulously pick out 100 of the most relevant items from the Library's extensive map collection (4.3 million maps to be precise), along with contacti...