Avaes Mohammad

 Avaes Mohammad is an award-winning poet, a performer, playwright and also research chemist.  He has been performing his dub/rap-inspired poetry on stages nationally and internationally since 2001 in various open-mics, clubs, galleries, pubs and festivals.  Avaes has been invited to perform his poetry as part of a national tour of Denmark during the Asia on the Road Festival, the Sunay’ha Invites Festival in London, CoHo Festival, Mumbai and has also featured in the Manchester Literature Festival. 

For Radio, Avaes has appeared upon and performed his poetry for BBC Radio Lancashire, has been a regular contributor for the BBC Asian Network’s Breakfast Programme and has also performed upon BBC Radio 3’s The Verb.  To commemorate the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984, Avaes Mohammad received a commission by the BBC to write and record his poem Bhopal, which was produced by BBC Radio 4 and awarded an Amnesty International Media Award.

Since 2003 Avaes’s poetic voice and commitment to storytelling of contemporary relevance have found new growth through the additional medium of scripts.  For Theatre, Avaes has written two nationally touring productions (In God We Trust, Shadow Companion) and two in-house productions (Blog, Bhopal).  For Radio, he has written Bora Bistrah, commissioned and produced by BBC Radio 3 and for Film he teamed up with South African director Avril Jacobs to create the BBC produced short film, Take It Slow.

Committed also to facilitation work, Avaes Mohammad has delivered poetry, performance and playwrighting workshops on behalf of Apples and Snakes, Contact Theatre, GMMAZ, Creative Partnerships, Alternative Living Theatre (Kolkata, India) and the Royal Court Theatre amongst others.

With Poems that range from issues of global socio-political significance to the origins of stars and Plays that range from depictions of Muslims in Guantanamo Bay to a Hip-Hop Theatre Musical, Avaes’s work seeks always to be true to the fundamentals of human equality, human potential and shared human experience.  His rap/dub inspired performance poetry style lends itself to musical accompaniment, although Avaes is also apt in allowing the inherent musicality of words and the human voice alone to deliver his poems to powerful effect.