Safe Spaces: Where We Make the World New

What kind of safety do we need in order to meet and create together, be it works of art, campaigns for change, or a magical combination of both? What safety do we need in order to become ourselves?

Inspired by Tice Cin’s new novel Safe Spaces, we invite you to celebrate the spaces in our lives that foster courage, invention and care. What is it about these spaces – physical or not – that allow us to be active parts of something so much bigger than ourselves, but also to step into the truest versions of ourselves? What makes them crumble when they do, and what makes them last beyond the efforts of individual people? How can we provide safe spaces for each other in private and public ways?

Tice Cin is joined by William Keohane, poet and author of the novel Out There - a reflection on transformation and becoming - and writer and activist Mai-Anh Vu Paterson, for a conversation about creativity, organising, community and change. The panel will be followed by a special performance from Tice Cin, based on the book Safe Spaces.

Our speakers:

Mai-Anh Vu Paterson is an Edinburgh-based writer, facilitator and community organiser, whose work engages with storytelling at the intersection of identity, migration, grief and community. She has been active in community-building, identity-based harm reduction and organising spaces for several years, with a focus on East and Southeast Asian communities in the UK. Her recent book, Beyond Belonging, examines how organisers can move past identity politics and anti-racism work that operates in isolation among different communities, towards sustainable action and solidarity.

Tice Cin is an interdisciplinary artist and author from North London. Her debut novel Keeping the House (2021) received a Somerset Maugham Award and a London Writers Award, was a Guardian Book of the Year and was shortlisted for a British Book Award and the Desmond Elliot Prize among other accolades. Its accompanying mixtape having her named as one of Notion Magazines Ones to Watch. Her BBC Radio 4 documentary on the North London heroin trade, How Much Can You Say? (2024) won an Audio Production Award. Her work has been published and commissioned by Granta Magazine, London Magazine, Somerset House, Montblanc, Cartier and more. She is the founder of the interdisciplinary production company Neoprene Genie. Cin’s sophomore novel SAFE SPACES was published by Granta in September 2026. Cin lives between North London and North Cyprus.

William Keohane is a writer from Limerick. His essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and British GQ Magazine, among others. Boxing Day, a poetry performance, toured internationally and was nominated for an award at the Dublin Fringe Festival. In 2021, he was longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing, received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and was one of ten poets selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. William holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick, and is currently completing a PhD in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen's University Belfast. Out There is his first book.

Our host: Lisa Fannen Lisa is a bodyworker and activist concerned with dialogue and information exchange about health in the broadest sense of the word, and in the context of social justice. She's involved with grass roots organising and has published related writing including the book Warp & Weft: psycho-emotional health, politics and experiences. Lisa is also a poet interested in (re)integrating text, sound/music and performance.

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