EMPOWERED - curated and presented by Dom Heslop- an exclusive interview with Nina Bhadreshwar for OFF THE SHELF FESTIVAL, Sheffield 2025
Thursday November 6th 2025
Photos by Charlie Morley of Morley Visuals
written by Nina Bhadreshwar
Having endured three decades of inane questions about one of the most seminal periods in culture post-Beatles and probably its most mythologised artist, I now do all I can to avoid them. Most interviewers are unprepared, digging for clickbait and a soundbite or new angle. However, Dom was a former student of mine when I'd had to drag myself through Barnsley post-1996 and retrain as a teacher. He saw me in a very raw form. Not only that, even as a fourteen year old, his Number One priority was "community". The ONLY way to get this young man's attention unless "the community" was involved. A heart after my own!
I was the odd one at school who insisted on doing both arts and sciences for A levels, got told off for 'falling between two stools' and thus disqualifying myself as suitable for medicine, so I studied a science degree in psychology followed by English literature and language at King's College. But even there, I didn't like the onus on literary criticism; my interest was always in the link between creativity and linguistics. I was less interested in a canon of literature that didn't represent me and more focused on recording and documeting the oral narratives and marginalised voices I'd grown up with ...which is how I started The Real State magazine in Sheffield in 1992.
Thirteen years and quite a lot of happenings later, I was Head of English at Abbeydale Grange School which was a crucible of over fifteen different languages all held together by the unique idiolect of Sheffield teens in 2005. Obviously, the lingo changes with each year - as it should because part of growing up is learning to be social, making up your own language off-limits to adults, values and beliefs informed - but not set - by the generations before. Being in a classroom with a teenager every day, five days a week, near to 270 odd days a year, not only did I have to learn their language, they had to learn mine. Once they knew I was listening to them, they started to ask me a few questions.
So, Dom already knew where I was coming from - long before all the Tupac hype, long before he was endorsed by Eminem, Elton John and mainstream media in the UK. When Dom, now an established podcaster and running his own CIC SlamBarz, film producer and Churchill Fellowship holder, suggested this event for Off the Shelf festival, I mmediately said YES. OTS is a truly unique festival and, if a must if you are a linguist, poet or just fascinated by language, new forms of telling story. I think it's my favourite, most inspirational festival as so diverse. It builds communities and creates collaborative, dynamic spaces in areas most festivals can't touch.
However, I was unprepared for the depth and preparation, research and presentation Dom and SlamBarz delivered. He sent me four pages of questions with the Letter of Agreement five months prior to the event and I was immediately hooked. in. No one has ever asked me those kind of questions - just the boring, standard ones. I knew I had to deliver if he had put in that much work.
The event was not just Dom and I having a nostalgic chinwag but a dynamic conversation which involved the audience - probably the most eclectic I've had yet at a book event comprising of filmmakers, crime fiction fans, former colleagues, rappers, artists, photographers, reader, poets, former students and local people with local jobs. Plus the awesome Sheffield indie bookstore, Juno Books, who shifted 40+ books in less than as many minutes.
Thank you to everyone who showed up, listened so attentively, asked brilliant questions, got involved, got chatting and bought a book. It truly felt like a homecoming.
And of course BIG UP Dom Helsop aka the ! Devotion, Off the Shelf and Slambarz for their generoisty and looking after me so very well. Big love always to Sheffield, I truly would not have a story to tell without you and your vibrant, unique way of "doing community".