A creative workshop with Samatar Elmi exploring neurodiversity, writing and artistic practice.

In this special session, participants will be invited to explore the relationship between neurodiversity and the creative process.

Combining discussion with practical reflection, this workshop will consider how neurodivergent ways of thinking, sensing, and communicating can shape artistic practice, and how creativity can open new ways of understanding language, learning, and expression.

Led by award-winning writer, musician, and educator Samatar Elmi, the session will offer participants space to reflect on their own creative processes while engaging broader questions of language, access, identity, and making.

There will be three guided writing activities to generate new material, with plenty of take-home prompts to deepen exploration. Participants are also invited to showcase their work-in-progress in the open mic night taking place immediately after the workshop.

Samatar Elmi is an award-winning writer, musician and educator. His debut collection, The Epic of Cader Idris (Bloomsbury, 2024), features the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize-winning poem “The Snails.” His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Magma and Poetry Wales, and has been anthologised widely.

He is currently touring two new publications, Agen Bien Fou and Reclamations: Disregard Prior Prompt, with a third collection, Our Eyes are Crystal Balls, forthcoming in 2026. Elmi is also writing a stage adaptation of King Lear for Fio Theatre in Cardiff.

As Knomad Spock, he has released critically acclaimed albums featured by Clash, Afropunk and BBC Radio 6. He is an Obsidian Fellow, associate poetry editor at flipped eye press, and works as a mentor and workshop facilitator specialising in neurodiversity and the creative process.

Description supplied by the event organiser.