The Guardian and Observer impressed by Welsh National Opera’s “captivating” ‘Migrations’, co-written by Shreya Sen-Handley

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“Take six stories, six librettists, an enormous cast including children and set it all to music. Stir vigorously. Add a flock of small birds, flapping, dancing and singing in search of their breeding ground. With an interlocking narrative crisscrossing history, from the pilgrim fathers to Bollywood, Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and Indian doctors in the NHS of the 1960s, the African Caribbean slave trade in 18th-century Bristol, a new oil pipeline in rural Canada, English lessons for refugees and, for good measure, a space rocket, Welsh National Opera’s Migrations could have been an unholy mess. At its world premiere at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff, on Wednesday, it was anything but. Continue reading →

Shreya’s column for the newspapers in June is about sleeping but might wake you up. “Enjoyed this excellent piece!” said one reader.

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“….Love and sleeping arrangements have always gone hand in hand. We ‘sleep together’ in every sense of the phrase when we get hitched. But sleeping habits have as much to do with health, history, culture and economics.

The size of our beds has grown over the ages, and that’s as much about evolution as it is about socioeconomics. Humans are larger today than at any other time in history, having soared four inches in height in prosperous countries in the last century. Breadthwise too there’s been abundant efflorescence, with global obesity tripling in the last five decades.

Yet, peek into one of the many beautifully preserved historic homes in Britain, and the beds you see are bijou for other reasons…”

Published in the Asian Age and the Deccan Chronicle, please read the article in full here

Galleries in Britain and China Exhibit Shreya’s Art!

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“In September 2022, Five Leaves Bookshop started its (online) journey around the world’s UNESCO Cities of Literature with a visit to Québec City. One of the cities on the tour was Nanjing in China, where Shreya Sen-Handley met Ding Jie.

Both writers are multi-talented – Shreya has written in many formats including memoir, poetry, fiction, plays, opera, and journalism. She has also illustrated children’s books. Ding Jie is not only a novelist, but he is also a fine artist.

Nanjing UNESCO City of Literature were kind enough to ship us some physical prints of Ding Jie’s paintings to hang in the bookshop, and they’ve also sent us digital images of those and others. As Shreya is no mean artist herself, we thought it would be fitting to host an online gallery of both their work…”

This was followed by an exhibition of Shreya’s artwork alongside Ding Jie’s in Nanjing, China!

Please read the rest of the article and have a gander at their vibrant art here

Top Notts Magazine Covers Shreya’s Opera

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“She’s had two books published by HarperCollins, written for international media and was even the regional head of a television channel at the age of 25. It’s fair to say that there are achievers in this world, and then there’s Shreya Sen-Handley. And if that impressive CV wasn’t enough, she’s now become the first Indian and South Asian woman to write a Western, international opera, called Migrations. We catch up with the multi-talented writer to find out more…”

Click here to read more

“Shreya Sen Handley is…the first South Asian woman to have written a libretto for an international opera,” states top Indian newspapers

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The Welsh National Opera’s Migrations, a series of six stories exploring migration from different angles, is composed by Will Todd and opens on October 3, 2020. Shreya Sen-Handley (Memoirs of My Body, Strange) is one of the six writers, and the first South Asian woman to have written a libretto for an international opera. She focusses on the experiences of the first Indian doctors in Britain.

Other than Jeet Thayil and Amit Chaudhuri, not so many Indian/Asian writers of either sex have had an opportunity to write international opera. Continue reading →