Podcasts about best first collection

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Stephen Sexton is an Irish poet and a lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast. While on campus in March 2025 he sat down with the Center for Irish Studies Director Joseph Lennon to discuss howpoetry can help us navigate the world. He reads poems from his two books ___________________Stephen Sexton the author of two books of poems – If All the World and Love Were Young, published in 2019 and Cheryl's Destinies, published in 2021.  He is a recipient of multipleawards, which include winning the National Poetry Competition in 2016, the Eric Gregory Award in 2018, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection in 2019, the E. M. Forster Awardfrom the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020.   Sexton has been teaching creative writing at the ⁠Seamus Heaney Centre⁠ for Poetry at Queen's University Belfast for six years.  Sexton was ten years old when the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 brought a formal end to the Troubles in the North of Ireland, which later in life made him realize that he was growing up in a time that he did not understand, and he became aware of a profound generational divide between him and his parents.  Sexton explains that in a sense, there is a “kind of ghostly history that is all around you, but you can't access it in the same way that other people can, so as a consequence, it doesn't necessarily show up in my writing.”  In his book, If All the World and Love Were Young, which happens to be set in 1998, there is one moment that addresses the Omagh bombing – a single deadliest attack in thirty years of violence that he remembers hearing about on the radio and then seeingon television.  But beyond that, the book is a blend of childhood memories that uses the analogy of a nineties Nintendo videogame, Mario Brothers, that digs into Sexton's more personal recollections about the house that he grew up in and memories of his mother.   Sexton's more recent book of poems, Cheryl's Destinies, was written during the COVID lockdown, where he explored a desire to bring together the improbable and the sensitive, hence the section of poems that imagines a collaboration between Billy Corgan lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins and Irish poet W.B Yeats. The book's general theme of being obsessed with and anxious about the future came through the conversations between two strangers separated by a century, where they discuss the difficulty of making art. Sexton's book questions the role of a poet and its connection to the role of a medium, as they both perform a similar function -- look at the world and interpret it.

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art. X: @mody_zana Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/poetry

In this episode of The Poetry Exchange, poet Nick Makoha talks with us about the poem that has been a friend to him: 'White Egrets (I)' by Derek Walcott.Nick actually joined us back in 2017 at Pushkin House, London, and we are delighted to be sharing this conversation with you now. It is very special to hear Fiona in this conversation, with all her usual warmth and brilliance.Nick Makoha's latest collection 'The New Carthaginians' is published this month from Allen Lane - you can order/buy your copy here.The event for 'On the Brink of Touch' by Fiona Bennett is on 26th February at The Bedford in Balham, London, and live streamed. We'd love for you to join us, and you can book your places here!Dr Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet. His new collection is The New Carthaginians published by Penguin UK. Winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. In 2017, Nick's debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was one of the Guardian's best books of the year. He was the ICA 2023 Writer-in-Residence. He was the 2019 Writer-in-Residence for The Wordsworth Trust and Wasafiri. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works alumnus. He won the 2015 Brunel African Poetry Prize and the 2016 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Prize for his pamphlet Resurrection Man. His play The Dark—produced by Fuel Theatre and directed by JMK award-winner Roy Alexander—was on a national tour in 2019. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Alfred Fagon Award and won the 2021 Columbia International Play Reading prize. His poems have appeared in the Cambridge Review, the New York Times, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Rialto, Poetry London, TriQuarterly Review, 5 Dials, Boston Review, Callaloo Birmingham Lit Journal and Wasafiri.*********White EgretsBy Derek Walcott I The chessmen are as rigid on their chessboard as those life-sized terra-cotta warriors whose vowsto their emperor with bridle, shield and swordwere sworn by a chorus that has lost its voice;no echo in that astonishing excavation.Each soldier gave an oath, each gave his wordto die for his emperor, his clan, his nation,to become a chess soldier, breathlessly erectin shade or crossing sunlight, without hours – from clay to clay and odourlessly strict.If vows were visible they might see oursas changeless chessmen in the changing lighton the lawn outside where bannered breakers tossand palms gust with music that is time's above the chessmen's silence. Motion brings loss.A sable blackbird twitters in the limes. From White Egrets by Derek Walcott, Faber & Faber 2010. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Berkeley Talks episode 216, celebrated poet and novelist Ocean Vuong joins in conversation with UC Berkeley English Professor Cathy Park Hong, a poet and writer whose creative nonfiction book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was a 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Together, they discuss the importance of genre fluidity and artistic experimentation, the role of disobedience in their writing and how language can be both a tool of oppression and liberation.“I personally feel a lot of affinity with you as a writer for many reasons,” began Hong, in front of a packed auditorium at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in April 2024. “But I think one of the key shared experiences is how the English language, once a site of estrangement and inadequacy for you, became this playground for bounty and experimentation. And part of that bounty and experimentation is how you refuse to limit genre by the way you swing from poetry to prose without feeling tethered by either.”“I think for me, genre was always as fluid as gender, even punctuation,” replied Vuong, author of two poetry collections — Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother — and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a widely acclaimed novel. “The rigor of punctuation, I think, is arbitrary. They're still up for grabs. And then the dialect of standard English, how legitimate is it? The linguists would tell us it's no more efficient or better or capacious than AAVE or other regional dialects. However, standard English is attached to the court system. It's a dialect that is also attached to an army and a navy, and so within that comes great, immense power.“I'm interested in genre as tendency rather than an ontological position to be. And I think there are tendencies that could be utilized and then left aside or even departed. What is a tendency in us stylistically that is then abandoned? I'm interested in abandon not as a way to cast away or to denounce, but as a restlessness. Like, I will use this mode until I'm done with it. I'll find something else and then return to it later. There's a kind of cyclical relationship. I think maybe if I'm trying to put order to it, I'll say there's a kind of inherent queerness in it — that, for me, my queerness demanded an alternative route, always.” Vuong was UC Berkeley's 2023-24 Avenali Chair in the Humanities, established in 1987 to bring distinguished figures in the arts and humanities to Berkeley for lectures, panel discussions, and meetings with students and faculty. Vuong is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the MacArthur Foundation's “Genius” Grant in 2019, the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.Read more about Vuong and Hong on the Townsend Center for the Humanities website.Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).Music by Blue Dot Sessions.Photo by Tom Hines/courtesy of Ocean Vuong. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece of exile and homecoming, Return to my Native Land – beautifully translated by John Berger – is now a Penguin Classic. To celebrate, Jason Allen-Paisant (who has written the introduction for the new edition) and Colin Grant discuss the poem. Allen-Paisant's most recent poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet), won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; Colin Grant is director of WritersMosaic, a division of the Royal Literary Fund, his most recent book is a memoir, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be (Jonathan Cape). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a special live episode, hosted at Storysmith to mark the launch of Strange Relations by Ralf Webb. We think about the contemporary crisis in masculinity through the lives and work of mid-century American writers John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers and James Baldwin, considering how their legacies might inform the current moment. We speak about the censorship of radical elements of these writers' work, including elements of their politics, queerness and intimacy, and consider the role of their interpersonal and intertextual relationships in understanding their work. We speak about what it means to reclaim space in the canon and expanding terms such as bisexuality, as well as notions of boyishness. We discuss the relationship between poetry and prose, the use of novelistic techniques in non-fiction and the ethical responsibility involved in writing about well-known literary figures. Ralf Webb is a poet, writer and editor based in Bristol. His debut collection of poems, Rotten Days in Late Summer was published by Penguin in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. Webb's poetry and critical writing has appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Fantastic Man, and The Poetry Review. He currently manages a creative writing mentorship programme in collaboration with Folio and First Story, which supports school-age writers from low-income backgrounds. References Strange Relations by Ralf Webb Late Days in Rotten Summer by Ralf Webb Warped Pastoral: Ralf Webb and Sam Buchan-Watts in conversation Visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Ralf's work.

Today's poem comes from Matthew Hollis' remarkable collection, Earth House, which blends explorations of the four cardinal directions and original translations of Anglo-Saxon verse from the Exeter Book. Matthew Hollis was born in Norwich in 1971, and now lives in London. His debut Ground Water (Bloodaxe Books, 2004) was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is co-editor of Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and 101 Poems Against War (Faber & Faber, 2003), and editor of Selected Poems of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, 2011). Now All Roads Lead to France: the Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber & Faber, UK, 2011; Norton, US, 2012) won the Costa Biography Award and the H. W. Fisher Biography Prize, was Radio 4 Book of the Week and Sunday Times Biography of the Year. He has published the handmade and letterpress pamphlets Stones (Incline Press, 2016), East (Clutag Press, 2016), Leaves (Hazel Press, 2020) and Havener (Bonnefant Press, 2022). Leaves was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Award 2021. He is the author of The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem (Faber & Faber, UK, Norton, US, 2022). He was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023. His second book-length collection, Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.-bio via Bloodaxe Books Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, we chat to Andrew McMillan about his novel, Pity. We discuss intersections of masculinity, sexuality and class and the way the body might hold these ideas within fiction and poetry. We think about the ways in which the form of the novel can hold multiple truths and stories, and how this links to post-industrial identities. We explore the dangers of describing post-industrial towns by their lack or an absence, and consider what it would take to find new definitions of community. We chat about the need for more northern stories, and the idea that everyone's village, town or city is worthy of literature. We think about finding a new language to discuss the past, which honours its legacies and yet allows us to define ourselves on new terms, in order to move forwards. Andrew McMillan's debut collection physical was the only ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award. The collection also won the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, a Somerset Maugham Award (2016), an Eric Gregory Award (2016) and a Northern Writers' award (2014). It was shortlisted the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Costa Poetry Award, The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2015. In 2019 it was voted as one of the top 25 poetry books of the past 25 years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018; it was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018, a Poetry Book of the Month in both The Observer and The Telegraph, a Poetry Book of the Year in The Sunday Times and won the inaugural Polari Prize. His third collection, pandemonium, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021, and 100 Queer Poems, the acclaimed anthology he edited with Mary Jean Chan, was published by Vintage in 2022. Physical has been translated into French, Galician and Norwegian editions, with double-editions of physical & playtime published in Slovak and German in 2022. He is Professor of Contemporary Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024. ​ References Pity by Andrew McMillan Pandemonium by Andrew McMillan Playtime by Andrew McMillan Physical by Andrew McMillan As always, visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Andrew's work.

To be alive is to be in conversation with the dead. The ghosts of loved ones are always swirling around us, and sometimes we're lucky enough to catch a glimpse. In the poem “Three Mangoes, £1,” Kandace Siobhan Walker describes a surprising encounter with her late grandmother at a busy market, and an encounter with a stranger.Kandace Siobhan Walker is a writer and artist of Jamaican-Canadian, Saltwater Geechee, and Welsh heritage. Her poems have appeared in Magma, The White Review, Poetry Wales, and a number of anthologies. She is the author of the pamphlet Kaleido (Bad Betty, 2022). In 2021, she was both the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and the winner of the White Review Poet's Prize. In 2019, she won the Guardian 4th Estate BAME short story prize. Cowboy, her debut full-length collection from CHEERIO Publishing, is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2023.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We're pleased to offer Kandace Siobhan Walker's poem, and invite you to read Pádraig's weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all our episodes.

Episode Notes No new episode this week. Instead, we're re-releasing an old episode. We review the lyrically written coming-of-age story Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi. It's about Ruby's struggles to fit in against the backdrop of racism, and, her mother's bouts with mental illness. Thank you all for listening. We will be back in the new year. If you want to get in touch, email audiobookishpod@gmail.com or DM us on social media. Send us your recommendations or requests! Buy the book here and we'll be kicked some money. About the author: Mona Arshi was born in West London, where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer with Liberty for a decade before receiving a master's in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection Small Hands was published in 2015, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Mona Arshi regularly appears on BBC Radio 4. Her poems have been published in The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the Times of India and most recently the London Underground. About the book : A teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again. Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she comes and goes and goes and comes, until, one day, she doesn't. Silence becomes Ruby's refuge, sheltering her from the weather of her mother's mental illness and a pressurized suburban atmosphere. Plangent, deft, and sparkling with wry humour, Somebody Loves You is a moving exploration of how we choose or refuse to tell the stories that shape us. The episode is brought to you by Alexandra Park BJJ. At Alexandra Park BJJ, we aim to be inclusive, everyone can benefit from this incredible art form, not just the athletic or ultra-competitive. So, if you want to develop core strength, build endurance and gain confidence, contact enquiries at alexandraparkbjj.co.uk or visit our website to attend a free class. http://www.alexandraparkbjj.co.uk/  If you have thought about podcasting before and realized that you need a lot of different tools and services, those days are over. With Zencastr's all-in-one podcasting platform, you can create your podcast all in one place and distribute to Spotify, Apple, and other major destinations. Use my special link https://zen.ai/8-eGgE8Oov567U6ejorYZg to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan. Support Audiobookish by contributing to their tip jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/audiobookish Find out more at https://audiobookish.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-8a93af for 40% off for 4 months, and support Audiobookish.

Maureen McLane's poetry has been praised for its deftness, intelligence and grace under extreme pressure. Her new collection, the aptly named What You Want, draws on these strengths to produce something remarkable and new.In a rare UK appearance, she reads from her work and talks to Will Harris, who also reads from his new collection Brother Poem (Granta). Harris has won the Forward Prizes for Best Single Poem and Best First Collection (for his debut, 2019's RENDANG), and more importantly, the LRB Bookshop Poetry Pamphlet Pick of the Year for 2016. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What self-consciousnesses do artists carry? It can be difficult to know how to hold onto confidence in your work, especially when small jibes from others remain long after apologies have been offered. Art compels and calls, and also complicates.Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils. His first book of poems, Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His second, The Million-petalled Flower of Being Here (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), won a Northern Writers Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2021 Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. He is the author of Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell, 2015); a collection of essays, Worlds Woven Together (Columbia University Press, 2022); a critical study, Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (OUP, 2020); and Asian/Other, a fusion of poetry criticism and memoir forthcoming from Icon in the U.K. and Norton in the U.S. Ravinthiran is an associate professor of English at Harvard University.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We're pleased to offer Vidyan Ravinthiran's poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Poet Liz Berry is taking a nighttime drive to the top of a hill in the Black Country to visit the ghosts of her childhood in Sedgley. Liz's first book of poems, Black Country, a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands' (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Liz's pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice and the title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. In her latest book, The Home Child, a novel in verse, Liz reimagines the story of her great aunt Eliza Showell, one of the many children forcibly migrated to Canada as part of the British Child Migrant schemes. Producer: Rosie Boulton A Must Try Softer Production A co-funded project between the BBC, The Space and Arts Council England.

In this episode, poet Ella Frears talks about the poem that has been a friend to her: The The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Her latest pamphlet I AM THE MOTHER CAT written as part of her residency at John Hansard Gallery is out with Rough Trade Books (2021).  Ella was recently named Poet in Residence for the Dartington Trust's grade II listed Gardens, selected by Alice Oswald. She is a trustee and editor for Magma Poetry and has been Poet in Residence for the National Trust, Tate Britain, The John Hansard Gallery, K6 Gallery, SPUD (the Observatory), conservation organisation Back from the Brink, and was poet in residence at Royal Holloway University physics department, writing about the Cassini Space Mission. https://ellafrears.com Ella is in conversation with The Poetry Exchange hosts Fiona Bennett and Michael Shaeffer.

"Creative daring" is the quality rewarded by the Goldsmiths Prize, now in its tenth year. What does it mean for an artist or writer to be daring and experimental? Shahidha Bari is joined by this year's winners Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams who have co-written their novel Diego Garcia, composer Matthew Herbert whose latest project is making music from the skeleton of a horse, and poet Stephen Sexton who has written a poetry collection structured round every level of the 90s video game Super Mario World. Producer in Salford: Ruth Thomson. The Goldsmiths Prize of £10,000 is awarded to "a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best" https://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/prize2022/ Matthew Herbert's new piece for the Estuary Sound Ark will have its interactive world premiere at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre in Canterbury on Sunday 27th November at 3pm before being archived and left untampered with in a carefully selected location for 100 years. https://thegulbenkian.co.uk/events/estuary-sound-ark/ He has also published a novel The Music: An Album in Words Stephen Sexton won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 for If All the World and Love Were Young. This year he is judging the prize You can find a collection of discussions exploring Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking programme website including a discussion of mould-breaking writing featuring Max Porter and Chloe Aridjis, poet Will Harris and academic Xine Yao https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pxn0 and a series of episodes exploring modernism hearing from Will Self and Alexandra Harris and looking at Mrs Dalloway, Finnegans Wake, Dada and Wittgenstein https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07p3nxh

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country which gave her first collection its title. Black Country won a chorus of praise, not to mention a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The collection is characterised by poems written in the Black Country dialect. Her recent pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, while its title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018.  Recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Berry talks about the lack of poetry that tells the truth about the experience of childbirth and rearing, the Black Country accent and pigeons.

In this podcast, the T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe talks to Jennifer Williams about kicking off the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, writing with multiple languages and alphabets, sense and non-sense in poetry and much more. Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, and she has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. If you would prefer to read, rather than listen to, our podcast with Sarah Howe, click here to see a transcript of the interview.

Nancy Campbell is a poet and non-fiction writer who grew up in the Scottish Borders. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to environmental concerns including How To Say ‘I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (winner of the Birgit Skiöld Award 2015) and Disko Bay (shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize). Carol Ann Duffy describes Disko Bay as ‘a beautiful debut from a deft, dangerous and dazzling new poet writing from the furthest reaches of both history and climate change'. In 2018 Nancy was appointed the Canal Laureate, a project managed by The Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust. Many of the poems written during this residency were installed along the waterways where they could be seen projected onto warehouses at night, stencilled onto towpaths, or cemented into new fish gates. The poems are collected in Navigations, a pamphlet published by HappenStance Press.  In 2020 Nancy received the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for the popularisation of geography through literature. She is currently working on a translation of traditional Greenlandic songs. In our latest podcast, she talks to Suzannah V. Evans at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival.

Our latest podcast departs from our usual interview format. It's a recording of a reading held in the Scottish Poetry Library in March. The poets featured are Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic. Nina Bogin (pictured) was born in New York City and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976. She taught English and literature at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard in France, until her retirement in 2017. Graywolf Press published her first book of poems, In the North, in 1989. Two books of poems followed, The Winter Orchards in 2001 and The Lost Hare in 2012, both published by Anvil Press. Her latest collection, Thousandfold, is published by Carcanet. Eoghan Walls was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. He attended Atlantic College on the coast of South Wales and has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda, Scotland and presently, northern England. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006. His first collection of poems, The Salt Harvest, was published by Seren in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection. He teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. His latest collection is Pigeon Songs, which is published by Seren. Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize. Brahic's translations include Guillaume Apollinaire's The Little Auto, winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize; and books by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Her latest collection is The Hotel Eden, which is published by Carcanet.

Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Timesbestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 36 languages.  A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR's “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker. Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU. He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.From https://www.oceanvuong.com/about. For more information about Ocean Vuong:Ocean Vuong on A Phone Call From Paul: https://a-phone-call-from-paul.simplecast.com/episodes/a-phone-call-from-paul-67-ocean-vuongNight Sky with Exit Wounds: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/night-sky-with-exit-wounds-by-ocean-vuong/“Torso of Air”: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/26/magazine/ocean-vuong-torso-of-air.html“Ocean Vuong is Still Learning”: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/ocean-vuong-is-still-learning

Stephanie Sy-Quia's Amnion (Granta) is a one-of-a-kind ‘lyric epic', weaving memoir, essay and poetics into one of 2021's most eagerly awaited debut poetry collections. Sy-Quia read from the book and was in discussion with Will Harris, whose own Granta debut RENDANG won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The event was chaired by Rachael Allen, Granta's poetry editor, whose most recent collection is Kingdomland (Faber). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tishani Doshi publishes poetry, essays, and fiction. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and a Firecracker Award. Her fourth collection of poetry, A God at the Door (Bloodaxe Books), has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry 2021 and was just published in the United States by Copper Canyon Press. She lives in Tamil Nadu, India. Find the book and more at: tishanidoshi.com As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. For details on how to participate, either via Skype or by phone, go to: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Coin a word or a phrase, then make the the title of your poem. Next Week's Prompt: Take a walk around your neighborhood and write a poem about it. (Alternatives to walking: Take a drive, sit on your porch, or look out your window.) The Rattlecast livestreams on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, then becomes an audio podcast. Find it on iTunes, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts.

Episode Notes Our last episode of season two! We review the lyrically written coming of age story Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi. It's about Ruby's struggles to fit in against the backdrop of racism, and, her mother's bouts with mental illness. Thank you all for listening. We will be back in the new year. If you want to get in touch email audiobookishpod@gmail.com or dm us on social media. Send us your recommendations or requests! Buy the book here and we'll be kicked some money. About the author: Mona Arshi was born in West London, where she still lives. She worked as a human rights lawyer with Liberty for a decade before receiving a master's in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her debut poetry collection Small Hands was published in 2015, winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Mona Arshi regularly appears on BBC Radio 4. Her poems have been published in The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the Times of India and most recently the London Underground. About the book : A teacher asked me a question, and I opened my mouth as a sort of formality but closed it softly, knowing with perfect certainty that nothing would ever come out again. Ruby gives up talking at a young age. Her mother isn't always there to notice; she comes and goes and goes and comes, until, one day, she doesn't. Silence becomes Ruby's refuge, sheltering her from the weather of her mother's mental illness and a pressurized suburban atmosphere. Plangent, deft, and sparkling with wry humour, Somebody Loves You is a moving exploration of how we choose or refuse to tell the stories that shape us. Support Audiobookish by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/audiobookish Find out more at https://audiobookish.pinecast.co This podcast is powered by Pinecast. Try Pinecast for free, forever, no credit card required. If you decide to upgrade, use coupon code r-8a93af for 40% off for 4 months, and support Audiobookish.

Born in the remote Khojand province of Tajikistan in 1964, Farzaneh Khojandi is widely regarded as the most exciting woman poet writing in Persian today and has a huge following in Iran and Afghanistan as well as in Tajikistan, where she is simply regarded as the country's foremost living writer. Her frequently playful and witty poetry draws on the rich tradition of Persian literature in an often subversive and humorous way.  Khojandi was translated by Narguess Farzad, Senior Lecturer, Persian Studies, at SOAS and Chair of Centre for Iranian Studies WITH the UK poet Jo Shapcott, who has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Persian poetry is rightly famed for the richness of its heritage and many classical Persian poets, such as Rumi and Hafez, are famous across the world. But little is known about how contemporary Persian-language poets have continued to enrich and enliven their tradition, a gap that the PTC sought to fill in its early days translating Persian poets working within the local variations of Dari spoken in Afghanistan, Farsi from Iran and Tajik from Tajikistan.

The final episode of the second season and it is a special one. We are joined by the wonderful Ella Frears. She is a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, Shine, Darling, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She has had poetry published in the LRB, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Ambit, The Rialto, and the Moth among others. Today she brings in two strange, short poems. One by Dianne Williams called The Idea of Counting. The other is by Michael Earl Craig and it's called Tomatoes Disrespect us.

A conversation with poet, novelist, and professor Ocean Vuong.  Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.This episode is in collaboration with 88rising for the Asia Rising Together Charity Concert.

In today's Pickle Jar we are joined by the brilliant Hannah Lowe. She is a poet, memoirist and academic. Her first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. Her family memoir Long Time, No See (Periscope, 2015) featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. Her second collection, Chan, is also published by Bloodaxe. Her latest brand new collection is expected out in 2021. She undertook her AHRC-funded PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, and now lectures in Creative Writing at Brunel University. Hannah is blessing us with a Marie Howe poem called 'What the living do.' You can read the poem here - https://poets.org/poem/what-living-do

Award-winning poet Will Harris, creator of RENDANG (Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and a Guardian best poetry book of 2020), is our guest this week. Will discusses how he perceives his writing career and explores form and feeling with Flo Reynolds.  Meanwhile Simon and Steph talk about our fundraising campaign for the Escalator talent development scheme, our lovely 'All Shall Be Well' prints to cheer everyone up in this tail end of 2020 and whether it's OK to have your Christmas tree up already. Hosted by Simon Jones and Steph McKenna. Find out more at https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/ Donate to the Escalator campaign: https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/escalator-donations-2020/ Get your 'All Shall Be Well' print: https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/article/buy-a-julian-of-norwich-screen-print/ Music by Bennet Maples.

From surrealism and science fiction to inspiration drawn from historic objects in stately homes and the painting of Francis Bacon: Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation with Will Harris, who has written long-form poems; new Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature Max Porter and Chloe Aridjis, who have written poetic novels which play with form; and academic Christine Yao, who looks at speculative fiction. Max Porter is the author of Grief Is The Thing With Feathers and Lanny. He has also collaborated with the Indie folk band Tunng and has a book out in January called The Death of Francis Bacon. You can hear dramatizations of Lanny at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000pqdc and Grief Is The Thing with Feathers on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000plzl Chloe Aridjis is a London-based Mexican writer who has published the novels Book of Clouds, Asunder and Sea Monsters, and was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2020. She was co-curator of a Leonora Carrington exhibition at Tate Liverpool and writes for Frieze. They have been announced as Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature to mark the 200th anniversary of the RSL https://rsliterature.org/ Will Harris is a writer of Chinese Indonesian and British heritage who won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2020 and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2021 for his collection RENDANG. He co-edited the spring 2020 issue of The Poetry Review with Mary Jean Chan. Christine Yao is one of the 2020 New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the AHRC to turn research into radio. She teaches at UCL on American Literature in English to 1900, with an interest in literatures in English from the Black and Asian diasporas, science fiction, the Gothic, and comics/graphic novels. You can find more conversations in the playlist Prose and Poetry on the Free Thinking website, which includes Max Porter discussing empathy, Christine Yao looking at science fiction and the experimental writing of the Oulipo group, and a whole series of conversations recorded in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p047v6vh Producer: Emma Wallace

Nancy Campbell is a writer of poetry, essays and non-fiction. A series of residencies with Arctic research institutions between 2010 and 2017 has resulted in many projects responding to the environment, most recently The Library of Ice: Readings in a Cold Climate, which was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2019. Campbell’s first poetry collection Disko Bay was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2016 and the 2017 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. In 2018/19 she was appointed the UK’s Canal Laureate by the Canal & River Trust and The Poetry Society. In our latest podcast, Nancy Campbell talks to Suzannah V. Evans at StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival.

Since her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 1996, Alice Oswald has been a major voice in UK poetry, with collections that frequently examine the natural world. In 2002 she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for 'Dart', a book-length poem telling the story of Devon's River Dart. Her latest collection, 'Nobody', is inspired by The Odyssey. Fiona Sampson has just published a new of poetry 'Come Down', which is situated in two contrasting landscapes in Hertfordshire and Australia. Her previous work, 'Limestone Country (Little Toller), is also rooted in place, telling personal stories about four particular limestone landscapes: a farming hamlet in Perigord, France, the Karst region of Slovenia, Coleshill, a rural parish in Oxfordshire, and Jerusalem. Presenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Cecile Wright

Stephen Sexton joins us on this month's episode of the Stinging Fly podcast, to read and discuss two poems by Sinéad Morrissey. Stephen Sexton's debut collection, If All The World And Love Were Young, was published in September 2019 by Penguin, and won The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection in October. Sexton's first pamphlet, Oils (Emma Press), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice; he won the UK National Poetry Competition in 2016 with 'The Curfew'; he won an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He lives in Belfast, where he teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Sinéad Morrissey was born in Portadown in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. In January 2014, she won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax, and in 2017 she won the Forward Prize for Poetry for her sixth collection On Balance. In 2007, Morrissey was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, while her poem 'Through the Square Window' took first place in the UK National Poetry Competition the same year. She is lecturer in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen's University, Belfast. The Stinging Fly Podcast invites Irish writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast's theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes', by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available for subscribers to read – subscribe now and access 20 years of the best new writing.

We can’t believe we’ve come to the end of our second series [sad face]... In this extended final episode, Jack and Rachael have fun chatting with guests Daljit Nagra and Nisha Ramayya in the studio and there are audio postcards from Aria Aber and Jericho Brown, as well as poems from our two presenters. Thank you to all our listeners – we hope you've enjoyed our second series. Remember to rate and review us and make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future episodes of the podcast. Show notes  Studio guests DALJIT NAGRA has published four poetry collections with Faber & Faber, including his most recent, British Museum (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571333745-british-museum.html) . He has won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award and the Cholmondeley Award. His books have been nominated for the Costa Prize and twice for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and he has been selected as a New Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society. He is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence for Radio 4 & 4 Extra, and presents a weekly programme, Poetry Extra (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qdjcn) , on Radio 4 Extra. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was elected to its Council, and is a trustee of the Arvon Trust. He teaches at Brunel University, London. NISHA RAMAYYA is a poet and lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. Her book, States of the Body Produced by Love (https://ignota.org/collections/featured/products/states-of-the-body-produced-by-love-by-nisha-ramayya) , is published by Ignota (2019). She has published three pamphlets: Notes on Sanskrit (2015) and Correspondences (2016) with Oystercatcher Press, and In Me The Juncture (https://sadpresspoetry.com/our-books/) (2019) with Sad Press. Threads (https://clinic-publishing.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/threads) , a creative-critical pamphlet co-authored with Sandeep Parmar and Bhanu Kapil, is published by clinic. She is a member of the 'Race & Poetry & Poetics in the UK' research group and the interdisciplinary practice-as-research group Generative Constraints. Audio postcards featured in this episode ‘Reading Rilke in Berlin’, written and read by Aria Aber. The poem is taken from Aria Aber’s new book, Hard Damage (https://www.ariaaber.com/hard-damage-1) (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).  ‘Stand’, written and read by Jericho Brown. Jericho Brown’s most recent collection, The Tradition (https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/jericho-brown/the-tradition/9781529020472) , is out now from Picador and is a 2019 National Book Award for Poetry finalist. About the presenters RACHAEL ALLEN is the poetry editor at Granta, co-editor at the poetry press clinic and of online journal tender. A pamphlet of her poems was published as part of the Faber New Poets scheme, and her first collection, Kingdomland (https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571341115-kingdomland.html) , was published by Faber in January 2019. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory award and New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse award. JACK UNDERWOOD is a poet, who also writes short fiction and non-fiction. A recipient of the Eric Gregory Award in 2007, he published his debut pamphlet in 2009 as part of the Faber New Poets series. His first collection Happiness (https://www.waterstones.com/book/happiness/jack-underwood/9780571313617) was published by Faber in 2015 and was winner of the 2016 Somerset Maugham prize. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College and is currently writing a non-fiction book about poetry and uncertainty. Two pamphlets, Solo for Mascha Voice and Tenuous Rooms were published by Test Centre in 2018. The Faber Poetry Podcast is produced by Rachael Allen, Jack Underwood and Hannah Marshall for Faber & Faber. Editing by Strathmore Publishing. Special thanks to Aria Aber, Jericho Brown, Daljit Nagra and Nisha Ramayya.

Award-winning author, poet and dancer Tishani Doshi reads from - and premieres - a performance of SMALL DAYS AND NIGHTS, her acclaimed new Bloomsbury novel, during Heckfield's month celebrating the Value of Silence. She is in conversation with Lucy Hyslop, the Assembly's curator, and music during the performance is created by Luca Nardon. Of Welsh-Gujarati descent, Doshi has published seven books of poetry and fiction - a signed copy of her new book will be available to buy. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologised and she has contributed to the Guardian, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and The Hindu. Doshi is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Her debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize. She lives in Tamil Nadu. Set against the vivid and evocative backdrop of modern India, Small Days and Nights is a story of family, of the ties that bind and the secrets we bury. Escaping her failing marriage, Grace has returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she finds herself heir to an unexpected inheritance. First, there is the strange pink house, blue-shuttered, out on a spit of the wild beach, haunted by the rattle of fishermen in their catamarans. And then there is the sister she never knew she had: Lucia, who has spent her life in a residential facility. Soon Grace sets up a new and precarious life in this lush, melancholy wilderness, with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the drily witty Auntie Kavitha and an ever-multiplying litter of puppies. Here in Paramankeni, with its vacant bus stops colonised by flying foxes, its solitary temples and step-wells shielded by canopies of teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of the world. But Grace’s attempts to play house prove first a struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury and bewilderment of life with Lucia. Luminous, funny, surprising and heart-breaking, Small Days and Nights is the story of a woman caught in a moment of transformation, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives that have meaning. Acclaim for Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods: ‘Intelligent, elegant, unflinching’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian, Best Summer Books, 2018 ‘Tishani Doshi combines artistic elegance with a visceral power to create a breath-taking panorama of danger, memory, beauty and the strange geographies of happiness. This is essential, immediate, urgent work and Doshi is that rare thing, an unashamed visionary’ John Burnside

Our latest podcast departs from our usual interview format. It's a recording of a reading held in the Scottish Poetry Library in March. The poets featured are Nina Bogin, Eoghan Walls and Beverley Bie Brahic. Nina Bogin (pictured) was born in New York City and grew up on the north shore of Long Island. She attended Kirkland College and received a B.A. degree from New York University. She has lived in France since 1976. She taught English and literature at the University of Technology of Belfort-Montbéliard inFrance, until her retirement in 2017. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1989 and Graywolf Press published her first book of poems, In the North, that same year. Two books of poems followed, The Winter Orchards in 2001 and The Lost Hare in 2012, both published by Anvil Press. Her latest collection, Thousandfold, is published by Carcanet. Eoghan Walls was born in Derry in Northern Ireland. He attended Atlantic College on the coast of South Wales and has lived and taught in Germany, Rwanda, Scotland and presently, northern England. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2006, an Irish Art's Council Bursary in 2009, and his work has been published widely in journals and anthologies throughout the UK and Ireland. His first collection of poems, The Salt Harvest, was published by Seren in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Strong Award for Best First Collection. He teaches creative writing at Lancaster University. His latest collection is Pigeon Songs, which is published by Seren. Beverley Bie Brahic is a poet and translator. A Canadian, she lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize. Brahic’s translations include Guillaume Apollinaire's The Little Auto, winner of the 2013 Scott Moncrieff Prize; and books by Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva.

Liz Berry was born in the Black Country which gave her first collection its title. Black Country won a chorus of praise, not to mention a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The collection is characterised by poems written in the Black Country dialect. Her recent pamphlet The Republic of Motherhood was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award, while its title poem won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2018.  Recorded at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, Berry talks about the lack of poetry that tells the truth about the experience of childbirth and rearing, the Black Country accent and pigeons.

* Agnieszka Checka is a writer. She has a zine about the experience of moving to Scotland, which is out now and available on Etsy. It’s called ‘One Of The Good Ones’. Her essay ‘When The Curtain Falls’ is going to be featured in the anthology The Bi-ble volume II: New Testimonials, which will be published by Monstrous Regiment in the summer. It’s about growing up queer in Poland.* Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She is also co-convenor of GRAMNET, the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network. Her book ‘Decolonising Multilingualism’ will be published by Multilingual Matters in June 2019. If you would like to read more about her ideas on multilingualism before June, a good place to start is here. She also recently released a book of poetry written with Zimbabwean writer Tawona Sitholé, which you can find here. You can follow her on Twitter here.* Eva Hanna is a PhD student who studies multilingualism. She is also the parents of two multilingual children. She also has a couple of excellent blog posts about the value of multilingualism which you can read here and here.* Natalie Findlayson stopped speaking German as a kid, but once she’d left school she ended up studying it at uni, spending some time in Germany and becoming completely fluent. Her parents might have felt at the time like they hadn’t succeeded in raising a bilingual kid but, ultimately, in a roundabout way, they did. She now teaches German and French at the University of Glasgow.* Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney and based in Edinburgh. Their poetry collections Tonguit (2015) and The Games (2018) were both shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Tonguit for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Harry Josephine was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word, and co-directs the performance platform Anatomy. Their participatory theatre has toured widely, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), CrisisArt (Italy) and Teszt (Romania). Harry Josephine’s performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category.* Andrew Macdonell lives in Brussels and tells people how to apply for research funding from the EU.

Andrew McMillan's debut poetry collection, Physical, was the first ever poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award. It also won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Eric Gregory Award and a Northern Writers Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award, the Costa Poetry Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2016, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Roehampton Prize and the Polari First Book Prize. His second collection, Playtime, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Autumn 2018. A doctor of neuroscience by training and a former Royal Society fellow at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Rachel Genn's debut novel The Cure was published by Corsair in 2011. Her second novel, What You Could Have Won, is due for publication in 2019 by Sheffield-based publisher And Other Stories. She teaches creative writing MA programmes at Sheffield and the Manchester Writing School.

The Verb this week is an extended conversation with the poet, editor, mentor, teacher and aphorist Don Paterson. Don Paterson first came to prominence in the early 90s, winning the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection for ‘Nil Nil' in 1993. The following year he was selected as one of the Poetry Society's ‘New Generation Poets' alongside contemporaries such as Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Jamie and his friend and mentor Michael Donaghy. He has published nine collections of poems, two of which have been awarded the TS Eliot Prize; God's Gift to Women in 1997, and again in 2003 for Landing Light. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010. He also teaches at the University of St Andrews and is the Poetry editor at Picador. In a 45-minute conversation, Ian takes a forensic look at Don Paterson's language map. They discuss the concept of the ‘true poem, the relationship between inspiration and spontaneity, where the impulse to write a poem comes from – and when to give up on a poem. We hear a close examination of poetic language as Don considers ‘the dance between vowels and consonants', the weight of an ending, his love of an ellipsis. Don also explains why he dislikes poems set to music, and why you shouldn't worry too much about your poetic voice… Don Paterson's latest publication is his book of New and Collected Aphorisms, ‘The Fall at Home'. This book, and all his collections of poetry are published by Faber. Presenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Cecile Wright

The poet Don Paterson meets the composer Thomas Adès. Don Paterson received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010, but when he left school at 16 he was aiming for a career in music, and worked as a guitarist and composer for many years. In 1993, his first volume of poems, Nil Nil, won the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection, and since then his work has won every major British award. He is professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews. By his mid-20s, Thomas Adès had won an international reputation as a composer, notably for his opera Powder Her Face, and his orchestral work Asyla, premiered by Simon Rattle in Birmingham. Since then he has written two more large scale operas, as well as numerous works for orchestra and for smaller groups. He is also a conductor and pianist. Producer Clare Walker

Liz Berry's debut collection, Black Country (Chatto & Windus, 2014), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2014. Black Country was chosen as a book of the year by The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mail, The Big Issue and The Morning Star. Liz’s poems have been broadcast on BBC Radio, television and recorded for the Poetry Archive. She has been a judge for major prizes including The Forward Prizes for Poetry and Foyle Young Poets. Liz works as a tutor for The Arvon Foundation, Writer’s Centre Norwich and Writing West Midlands. Mona Arshi is a poet and lawyer. Her poem 'Hummingbird' won first prize in the Magma Magazine poetry competition in 2012. She also was one of the Competition winners for the World Events Young Artists Festival in September 2012. She was also an award winner in the Troubadour International Competition for her poem ‘Bad day in the Office’. In 2014, she was joint winner of the Manchester Creative Writing Competition. A portfolio of her poems appeared in TEN-THE NEW WAVE in 2014 by Bloodaxe books. Mona’s poetry has been published widely in magazines including Poetry Review, Magma, Rialto and the Sunday Times. Her début collection of poem ‘Small Hands’ was published by Liverpool University in 2015 and won the Forward Prize for best first collection. Mona was one of ten poets selected for the ‘Complete Works’, a national development programme funded by the Arts Council.

The first Lesson from the School of Night, featuring poet Sam Riviere, author of 81 Austerities (Faber & Faber 2012), winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Standard Twin Fantasy (Eggbox, 2014), and Kim Kardashian’s Marriage (Faber & Faber, 2015).

In this podcast, the poet Sarah Howe talks to Jennifer Williams about kicking off the 2016 Edinburgh International Book Festival, writing with multiple languages and alphabets, sense and non-sense in poetry and much more. http://sarahhowepoetry.com/home.html Sarah Howe is a British poet, academic and editor. Her first book, Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus, 2015), won the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Sunday Times / PFD Young Writer of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Born in Hong Kong in 1983 to an English father and Chinese mother, she moved to England as a child. Her pamphlet, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse, 2009), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. Her poems have appeared in journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Ploughshares and Poetry, as well as anthologies such as Ten: The New Wave and four editions of The Best British Poetry. She has performed her work at festivals internationally and on BBC Radio 3 & 4. She is the founding editor of Prac Crit, an online journal of poetry and criticism. Previous fellowships include a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry and a Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. Find out more about her latest academic projects here. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow in English at University College London. Photo credit: Hayley Madden

This month's guest is Hilary Menos, farmer, poet and winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 for 'Berg'. Her most recent collection is 'Red Devon', which draws from her experience living in the Devonshire Domesday Manor which is now her home. In this interview, Hilary shares some of the crowdpleasing 'bankers' from her poetry set, writing poems in a slaughterhouse, and Ryan grills Hilary on her Superman knowledge. Plus - more sparks from Ryan. Produced by Culture Laser productions @culturelaser.

Three of the best new poets in years were reading in the Bookshop. Helen Mort’s *[Division Street][1]* (Chatto) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize (almost unheard of for a debut collection) and the Costa Prize; Liz Berry’s *[Black Country][2]* (Chatto) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection; and Sarah Howe’s just-released *[Loop of Jade][3]* (Chatto) is shortlisted for the same award. United by a strong sense of place, any one of them on their own would be worth turning out for – on a rare triple-bill, presenting an evening of poetry and conversation, they’re unmissable. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.

JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.

JO SHAPCOTT, poet, has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Jo is patron of Medicine Unboxed.

Frances Leviston’s Public Dream was published by Picador in 2007 and shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Jerwood-Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. www.mptmagazine.com

Don Paterson was the twentieth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2012. Don Paterson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Rain (Faber, 2009; FSG, 2010). He has published two books of aphorism and a compendium, Best Thought, Worst Thought (Graywolf, 2008). He has also edited a number of anthologies. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Most recently, Rain won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR's “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.   Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.  He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where he serves as an Associate Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-vietnamese-with-kenneth-nguyen/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy