Up from Paradise
Creative Writing Workshop

£14 – General
£8 – 18 to 25 / Student
£8 – Disabled Admission
£8 – Universal Credit or Pension Credit recipients
£0 – Essential Companion discounted with tag

“She said The Farm is a return to what humans and the land needs now - joy, rest, renewal, culture-making, celebrating life, growing and cooking up fresh ideas and futures.” - Up from Paradise, Alinah Azadeh

Join award-winning writer and artist Alinah Azadeh for a writing workshop outside at the Warren Hill dewpond.

With Alinah you will be focused on speculative thinking, writing through a ‘what If’, ‘if only’ and ‘If this carries on’ lens. This is a genre long used by artists, writers and filmmakers as a tool for personal and collective visioning in turbulent, precarious times.

The workshop explores the power and possibility of imagining new futures for downland sites, such as Towner Seven Sisters at Black Robin Farm, and the potential for new, cultural life within the much loved and changing landscape of the South Downs. You will do this with Alinah through discussion, reflection and using writing prompts on themes of care, culture, heritage, ecology and community.

An optional reading list will be sent ahead of the workshop. Drawing on personal experience in and of the landscape and your response to sites and the reading list items, you will come away with a new poem, story or piece of speculative non-fiction. For those with an interest, love for or connection to the South Downs/ Eastbourne/ Beachy Head/ Seven Sisters area, ecology, arts and culture. No previous writing experience necessary.

Meet at the Warren Hill dewpond.
What Three Words: ///lunch.pass.resist

This event is part of Digging Horizons, a series of autumn talks, walks and events exploring new approaches to landscape, ecology and archaeology. Together, these events will test and shape future activities for Towner Seven Sisters, Towner's forthcoming site at Black Robin Farm. Meet, experiment and engage with the cultivation of a cultural site stitched into the landscape. Digging Horizons is made possible with The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Alinah Azadeh is a writer, artist, performer and cultural activist of British Iranian heritage. Alinah is winner of the Bridport Prize for Memoir 2025 for her manuscript, Meeting the Water. She was inaugural writer-in-residence at Seven Sisters Country Park and Sussex Heritage Coast for the South Downs National Park 2020-24 and devised a pioneering outdoor creative writing programme exploring the landscape through a decolonial lens. This resulted in We Hear You Now, a new audio walk of literature by 13 writers of global majority heritage, installed across the Seven Sisters coastline until 2029.

Alinah’s recent public writing commissions include The Four Directions (2025), a series of texts carved into artist’s benches up on the South Downs at Warren Hill dewpond, near Beachy Head, as part of Towner Eastbourne's 100th anniversary. Alinah is Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at University of Chichester and publishes regularly on Substack.

www.alinahazadeh.com

Please wear appropriate clothing for an outdoor workshop. If weather makes an outside workshop not possible, the workshop will take place in Studio 1 at Towner Eastbourne.

We have a budget available to make this event as accessible as possible – this can include interpretation services or other access needs we can meet to enable you to participate. If you require access arrangements, please email programme@townereastbourne.org.uk two weeks before the event date so that we can book a service if needed.