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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
The Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University Podcast Series
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/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
Possessing a friendship that spanned the Atlantic, Scotland's John Burnside (1955-2024) and America's Allison Funk were captured in conversation, speaking about what they enjoy about each other's countries, from poetry and music to the mutability of the landscape and people. Allison Funk is the author of four volumes of verse, including The Tumbling Box (2009). John Burnside's Black Cat Bone (2011), is one of only two titles to have won both the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize for Poetry. In a conversation that runs from delta blues to Virginia Woolf, Funk and Burnside explain the way in which they've influenced each other's work while still being ‘opposite sides of the same coin'.
Victoria Chang is the subject of this month's Nothing But The Poem podcast. The Taiwanese-American poet has had seven collections of poetry published, her most recent - With My Back To The World (2024) - winning the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection. 'Chang has liberated the Ekphrastic form to new lyric heights and depths. Inventive, meditative, audacious, strange and soulful ... that engages the eye and mind as much as the ear and heart' - Raymond Antrobus 'Chang invites readers to query depression, grief, and the purpose of art. There are no answers here, only an ongoing conversation.' - Emily Pèrez Our resident podcast host Sam Tongue took an immersive dive into two Victoria Chang poems Mr Darcy and Edward Hopper's Office at Night. Find out what Sam - and the Friends Of The SPL group - took from these poems in our Nothing But The Poem podcast.
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.
Danez Smith has won and been nominated for a lot of big prizes for their poetry, including the UK’s Forward Prize, the National Book Critic Circle Award and the National Book Award. But in 2020, Smith stopped writing. In the depths of the pandemic, after the death of George Floyd in Smith’s hometown of Minneapolis, poetry began to feel less powerful as a place for social change. Danez Smith joined poet Diannely Antigua, author of two poetry collections including “Good Monster,” for a conversation with OPB’s Jenn Chavez at the 2024 Portland Book Festival to talk about the role of poetry in our fractured society and our fractured lives.
Strange Relations (Sceptre) explores the crisis in mid-century masculinity through the lives and works of four bisexual writers who fought to express and embody alternate possibilities. The nonfiction debut of Forward Prize-shortlisted poet Ralf Webb, it considers the ways in which Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever and James Baldwin, resisted damaging contemporary expectations around gender and sexuality. Will Tosh has described it as ‘wise, humane, hopeful and exquisitely written'. Webb was in conversation with Philippa Snow, author of Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment (Repeater) and, most recently, Trophy Lives: On the Celebrity as an Art Object (MACK). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We meet legendary poet Joelle Taylor.Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future.Follow @JTaylorTrashVisit: https://joelletaylor.co.uk/ 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.
Send us a textFirst up on today's show, I chat with Liam Carson, who is back again with another episode of the Irish language Festival, IMRAM. And we hear from Kelly Michels, whose Forward Prize shortlisted debut collection, American Anthem, published by Gallery Press this year, focuses on the tragedies both personal and national, of the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects of addiction and of gun violence in America, where the poet grew up. We talk to Kelly about growing up in the U.S., writing about her mother's addiction, the mass shootings in her home town and her take on the American anthem.. Kelly's Toaster Challenge choice is 'Starlight Scope Myopia' by Yusef Komunyakaa, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of selected poems, Neon Vernacular.Intro/outro music: Colm Mac Con Iomaire, ‘Thou Shalt Not Carry' from The Hare's Corner, 2008, with thanks to Colm for permission to use it. Incidental musicScott Buckley, Emmit Fenn.Logo by Freya SirrTo subscribe to Books for Breakfast go to your podcast provider of choice (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google etc) and search for the podcast then hit subscribe or follow, or simply click the appropriate button above. Support the show
Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio, the podcast for writers everywhere brought to you by Pen to Print For this month's Write On! Audio and friends podcast we're featuring The Seren Poetry Podcast. Seren is Wales' leading independent literary publisher, specialising in English-language writing from Wales for over forty years. With a list spanning poetry, fiction and non-fiction, many of Seren's books are shortlisted for and win major literary prizes across the UK. With two series already published, the Seren Poetry Podcast, which is produced and sometimes presented by our producer Chris Gregory, aims to showcase poets and their most recent collections combining a long form interview with excerpts from the collection. For this podcast we're sharing an interview with poet Kim Moore about her Forward Prize-winning collection “All the Men I Never Married”. The interviewer is Chris Gregory and the interview was recorded on location at Wordsworth Grasmere in the Lake District. Listen to The Seren Poetry Podcast via Spotify here https://open.spotify.com/show/6B7qqkSYira1spETGHp4Ml?si=fa1e4dcdc91f41d2 Find out more about Seren here https://www.serenbooks.com/ And about Kim Moore, the subject of the interview in this episode here https://www.kimmoorepoet.co.uk/ We're always delighted to read your contributions so if you'd like to see your words in Write on! or hear them on this podcast please get in touch. Please submit to: https://pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/ Thank you for listening to Write On! Audio. This edition has been presented by Tiffany Clare and produced by Chris Gregory. Write On! Audio is an Alternative Stories production for Pen to Print. This podcast is produced using public funding from Arts Council England
This week on The Verb Ian McMillan is joined by Paul Farley, author of the bird-centred 2019 poetry collection 'The Mizzy'. Especially for The Verb he's written us a brand new poem that considers birds on our workplace, inspired by new 'Nature Postive' building regulations.Malika Booker is tackling this week's 'Neon Line' poem. Booker won the Forward Prize for 'Best Single Poem' in 2023 and she takes us through the 2024 winners, who have recently been announced. Linguist and author of 'You're All Talk', Rob Drummond brings us up to speed on langauge change.And there's a brand new comission from Kate Fox on Strictly Season as well as a reading from her new book 'On Sycamore Gap' - inspired by the famous tree near Hadrian's Wall that was felled last yearPresenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Jessica Treen
In this episode of Black Market Reads: On Health Lissa and Bukata talk with poet Danez Smith about his latest work, BLUFF. Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures. Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem--part map, part annotation, part visual argument--offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it. Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love--those given and made--are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible. Danez Smith is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don't Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award. Our production team for this episode includes co producers/ Lissa Jones and Edie French, co-host/Bukata Hayes, technical director/Paul Auguston, The Voice/Yo Derek, and our artist of inspiration/Ta-coumba T. Aiken. We thank Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota for supporting On Health focusing on the intersection of health, race, and culture. Black Market Reads: On Health is a collaboration with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of Blue Cross' long-term commitment to improving the health of Minnesota communities and ensuring that all people have opportunities to live the healthiest lives possible.
Ralf Webb is the author of Rotten Days in Late Summer, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in Fantastic Man, Granta, the Guardian and the London Review of Books. He tutors in creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny abouth his first nonfiction book Strange Relations: Masculinity, Sexuality and Art in Mid-Century America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The appeal of 'the road less travelled by', Emily Brontë as self-help guru, a new way to look at Little Red Riding Hood and the 'little miracles' we might notice when we care for the elderly; Ian McMillan celebrates poems that explore all of these ideas with his guests, the poets Len Pennie, Malika Booker, Kate Fox, and Michael Symmons Roberts.Michael Symmons Roberts' poetry collections include 'Drysalter', 'Mancunia' and 'Ransom'. This week Michael explores Robert Frost's poem 'The Road not Taken' and sheds light on the strange power of the 'neon' line in the poem (a memorable line that takes the poem to another level) 'I took the road less travelled by'.Kate Fox is a stand up poet, spoken word artist and broadcaster, her latest poetry collection is 'Bigger on the Inside'. Kate has written a new poem for The Verb in which Emily Brontë advises us that most of our thoughts 'are nowt but hill fog' and that problems can be solved by 'a walk or a big dog', or 'a walk with a big dog'.Malika Booker is the only poet to have won The Forward Prize for best single poem twice - she reads one of those winning poems, 'The Little Miracles' for The Verb. Malika founded the groundbreaking poetry workshop 'Malika's Kitchen' with Roger Robinson. Her books include 'Pepper Seed' and her poetry can be found in the 'Penguin Modern Poets' series.Len Pennie's collection 'Poyums' is a best-seller, and explores domestic violence and misogyny with energy, wit and inventive rhyme, It's written in a mixture of Scots and English. Len has a huge following on social media, partly down to her celebration of a 'Scots word of the Day'. For The Verb, she reads a poem about telling the story of a relationship in your own words, and considers the influence of Robert Burns.
Ella Frears is a poet and artist based in London. Her collection Shine, darling was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection, and the TS Eliot prize for poetry. Writers/artists mentioned John Cooper Clarke, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, Toni Morrison, William McGonagall. Book mentioned Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood.
The UN climate conference in Kyoto in 1997 is the setting for a new play at the RSC. Its writers Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson talk about the dramatic potential they saw in that moment and in the decade leading up to it. Nathaniel Rateliff is a singer songwriter based in Denver, Colorado whose style of Americana and collaboration with the Nightsweats has garnered a steady following of fans due to his talent in storytelling and performance. He joins us to play live.We celebrate Midsummer's Day with poems that explore this heady midpoint in the year. Critic Tristram Fane Saunders chooses some of the most evocative midsummer verses, and Forward Prize-winning poet Sasha Dugdale reads “June”, a brand new poem specially commissioned for today's Front Row.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Torquil MacLeod
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.
In this episode of The Poetry Exchange, we talk with one of poetry's greatest leading lights, Malika Booker, about the poem that has been a friend to her: ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner' by Lorna Goodison.Malika Booker, currently based in Leeds, is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika's Poetry Kitchen (A writer's collective). Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022).Malika has won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem TWICE: in 2020 for 'The Little Miracles' (Magma, 2019), and most recently in 2023 for 'Libation', which you can hear her read in this episode.'Libation' was first published in The Poetry Review (112:4). ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner' by Lorna Goodison is published in Turn Thanks by Lorna Goodison, University of Illinois Press, 1999.You can read the full text of ‘The Domestic Science of Sunday Dinner' on our website.P.S. don't forget you can pre-order your copy of Poems as Friends – The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology – which is published by Quercus Editions on 9th May 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sasha Stiles is a poet, artist and AI researcher who is widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art. She is the recipient of a Future Art Award and has been nominated for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is also a co-founder of the digital poetry gallery, theVERSEverse. Recorded on February 16, 2024 as a Space on X.Follow the guest:https://twitter.com/sashastilesFollow the host:https://twitter.com/0x_ScooterFollow Particle:https://twitter.com/Collectparticlehttps://www.particlecollection.comhttps://www.instagram.com/particlecollectionTimestamps:(00:00) Introduction(01:36) Tradition of Sending AI-Generarted Valentines(06:37) Poetry & Books that Influenced Sasha's Love for Language(10:13) Finding a Balance Between Time Spent Offline & Online(13:24) Poetry as the Original Blockchain(19:24) Technelegy, Sasha's Evolving AI Alter Ego(25:16) Relationship with Technelegy(28:49) Repetition & Patterns in Generative Language & Poetry(35:30) Impact of Technology on Authorship and Creativity(42:53) Significance of Daughter of E.V.E.(47:26) Meaning behind Every Poem Starts with a Seed (52:42) Influence of Kalmyk Heritage on Artistic Career(56:36) Value of Friction in the Process of Collecting Art(59:55) Writer & Artist Recommendations from Sasha (1:04:33) Outro
Ian McMillan presents a celebration of remarkable poets and poetry readings from one of the major events in the poetry calendar: the TS Eliot Prize Readings at the Royal Festival Hall in London. The prize is awarded annually by the TS Eliot Foundation for the best collection of the year. The winning book Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant also won the 2023 Forward Prize.
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.
Winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, Irish poet Seamus Heaney died ten years ago when he was 74. Known for poems that engage with the immediacy of the natural world and its physicality, Heaney spoke to Eleanor Wachtel in 2010 about his book Human Chain. It won UK's £10,000 Forward Prize, among Heaney's many other honours. *This interview originally aired May 23, 2010.
The city of Leeds seen through public art past, present and future. In this edition, Malika Booker considers an architectural sculptural frieze located on Abtech House, 18 Park Row, Leeds (formerly West Riding Union Buildings) created in 1900 by the stonemason and sculptor Joseph Thewlis. The sculpture depicts emblematic figures related to Leeds commerce at the time, linked to the abundance of textile industry and mills in Yorkshire and Leeds. As a member of the Caribbean community living in Chapeltown, she is particularly interested in the Minerva Goddess presiding over these figures, as well as the figures depicting the bank's relationship with empire. She is caught by the multicultural portrayal of figures representing different aspects of Industry and the world, but of particular interest is the depiction of an enslaved African figure lifting and bending over bales of cotton. This lyrically poetic essay considers the changing visual, political, social and environmental changes that the sculptural frieze has witnessed and the ways in which the world has moved away from this depiction of black bodies. Malika is and international writer, double winner of Forward Prize for Poetry and Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow at University of Leeds.Writer/reader, Malika Booker Sound designer, Alisdair McGregor Producer, Polly ThomasContains some historical racial terminology. Looking at Leeds is a co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and The Space with funding from Arts Council England. A Thomas Carter Project for BBC Radio 3.
Latest up from Spoken Label (Spoken Word Podcast) making her debut is the wonderful Julia Webb. Julia's bio advises that she grew up in "Thetford, a small town in rural Norfolk. Her first poetry collection Bird Sisters was published by Nine Arches Press in 2016. Her second collection Threat was published by Nine Arches in May 2019. Her third collection The Telling was published by Nine Arches in May 2022. Julia lives in Norwich where she is a poetry editor for Lighthouse, teaches online and real world poetry courses, mentors writers, runs Norwich Stanza and works for Cafe Writers. In 2012 she was awarded a TLC free read, which you can read about here. In 2011 she won the Poetry Society's Stanza competition and in 2018 she won the Battered Moons poetry competition. Her poem “Sisters” was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prize. In 2016 she spent a month as writer in residence on Norwich Market." Julis's books can be purchased from Nine Arches Press at https://ninearchespress.com/ Her website is https://juliawebb.org/
Caribbean migrants striving to make their lives in London are the focus of this 1956 novel by Samuel Selvon. Written in creolized English, it established him as an important Caribbean voice. In an event organised in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature and the British Library, Shahidha Bari is joined by the poet Anthony Joseph, the writer Guy Gunaratne and by Susheila Nasta who is a writer, critic and literary executor and representative for the Sam Selvon literary estate. Guy Gunaratne‘s first novel In Our Mad And Furious City won the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Jhalak Prize and the Authors Club Award. Their second novel published earlier this year is called Mister Mister. Anthony Joseph was born in Trinidad. The author of five poetry collections, Sonnets for Albert, won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 and was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. Susheila Nasta founded Wasafiri, the Magazine of International Contemporary Writing and is an Emeritus Professor at Queen Mary, London and the Open University. Her books include The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, and Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now. Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can find other conversations about prose, poetry and drama - some recorded as events at the British Library and in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature gathered into a collection on the programme website for BBC Radio 3's Free Thinking. They are all available to download as the Arts & Ideas podcast.
In this episode Gary Mansfield speaks to Joelle Taylor (@jtaylortrash)Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023.She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future.IN CASE OF EMERGENCY will feature nearly 200 artworks across visual, writing and music categories entered into the 2023 Koestler Awards for art in the criminal justice system, by individuals in prisons, secure mental health facilities, immigration removal centres, young offender institutions and on community sentences across the UKCover image credit @fish2commercialFor more information on the work of Joelle Taylor go tohttp://joelletaylor.co.ukFor more information on the work of Koestler Artsgo tohttps://koestlerarts.org.ukTo Support this podcast from as little as £3 per month: www.patreon/ministryofartsFor full line up of confirmed artists go to https://www.ministryofarts.orgEmail: ministryofartsorg@gmail.comSocial Media: @ministryofartsorg Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ian McMillan discusses the act of looking, what it means to write about art and to translate what you see into language, and the relationship between art and life; with American poet Terrance Hayes, Christine Coulson, whose novel One Woman Show is told through museum wall labels, author and art critic Laura Cumming, and Jason Allen-Paisan whose Forward Prize winning collection, Self-Portrait As Othello, explores self-examination through the depiction of the other.
Madonna is still in the spotlight 45 years after bursting onto the pop scene in the 1980s, inspiring fashion, dance and youth culture, as well as being the world's best-selling female artist of all time. Author of the biography Madonna: A Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel explores what's behind her enduring influence and music critic Pete Paphides assesses last night's Celebration tour performance, rescheduled after her recent serious health scare. The latest film from director Martin Scorcese focuses on the Osage Nation community, who back in the 1920s had become rich overnight when oil was discovered beneath their land in Oklahoma. Based on a true story, Killers of the Flower Moon sees an improbable romance develop between Leonardo DiCaprio's Ernest and Lily Gladstone's indigenous Mollie, as members of her Osage tribe are murdered under mysterious circumstances, killings which are investigated by what was to become the FBI. Published in 2015, Adam Sisman wrote what is considered to be the definitive biography of John le Carré. What he left out about the author befits a Cold War spy novel: he was secretive, self-mythologizing and even deceptive. Sisman's new book, The Secret life of John le Carré, reveals for the first time the frustrating process of writing a biography about the writer who hid his infidelities and inconsistencies. The Forward Prizes are among UK and Ireland's most coveted poetry awards. These include best poetry collection, first collection, single poem - written and, new for this year, best single poem – performed. Tonight in Leeds the judges will announce the winners as Front Row is on-air - and we should know who has won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem – Written, and be able broadcast the poet reading it.
Four Faber poets will join us to read from their recent collections.Describing Declan Ryan's long-awaited debut, Crisis Actor, Liz Berry called it ‘elegant and heartaching'. Maggie Millner‘s Couplets, also a debut, is a novel in verse, a unique repurposing of the 18th century rhyming couplet into a thrilling story of queer desire. Hannah Sullivan's follow-up to her T.S. Eliot Prize-winning Three Poems, Was it For This, also consists of three long poems, on subjects ranging from London and the Grenfell fire to new motherhood. The title poem of Nick Laird's new collection, Up Late, won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Terrance Hayes has characterised his work as containing 'a truth-telling that's political, existential, and above all, emotional'.Find more events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Irish poet Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections and an illustrated poetry booklet. Her three collections were published by Bloodaxe Books: The River in 2015, When the Tree Falls in 2019 and A Change in the Air in 2023, which is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and is also longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2023. In 2016 The River was the first poetry collection ever shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Award, given for a distinguished work of fiction or non-fiction evoking the spirit of a place. Originally from a farm in Roscommon, Jane now lives in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow. Find more info at: http://www.janeclarkepoetry.ie/ As always, we'll also include live open lines for responses to our weekly prompt or any other poems you'd like to share. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Write a villanelle that includes a cryptid (i.e., a mythological figure, such as the Loch Ness Monster). Next Week's Prompt: Pick a single word at random from the dictionary and use that as the title of a poem in which someone gets their hands dirty. 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.
Sasha Stiles is author of the “instant techno classic” poetry collection, Technelegy (Black Spring Press Group, 2021), and has been named “perhaps the leading blockchain poet” by Right Click Save, as well as one of the top 10 NFT artists to watch in 2023. Her work is available via many of the world's top platforms, including fxhash, Quantum, SuperRare, Objkt, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, Artsy, and Infinite Objects. In 2022, she became the first writer to bring AI-powered literature to a major auction house when her poem, “COMPLETION: When it's just you,” sold at Christie's. Other honors include a Future Art Award, nominations for the Forward Prize, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and finalist status for the Christopher Smart Prize and Palette Emerging Poet Prize. Stiles is also co-founder of theVERSEverse, an acclaimed crypto literary collective where poems are art, poetry is code, and language is limitless. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Stiles lives just outside New York City with her husband and studio partner, Kris Bones. Find more information at her website: https://www.sashastiles.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. A Zoom link will be provided in the chat window during the show before that segment begins. For links to all the past episodes, visit: https://www.rattle.com/rattlecast/ This Week's Prompt: Write a prose poem. Make it a parable and include at least one animal. Next Week's Prompt: Write a poem as a dialogue with an alter-ego. 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.
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.
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist and playwright. She is best known for her book Citizen: An American Lyric which combines short stories about everyday injustices experienced by people of colour with poems telling the stories of black men who died during confrontations with the police. The book won several awards in the US and the UK's Forward Prize for best collection in 2015. Claudia was born in Kingston, Jamaica and at seven followed her parents to New York City where they had emigrated some years before. After graduating from university in 1993, she won a poetry prize for her thesis which became her first book – Nothing in Nature is Private. In addition to her poetry Claudia has written three plays and has taught at several universities including Yale and New York University. In 2016 she won a prestigious ‘Genius Grant' from the MacArthur Fellowship which celebrates intellectual and artistic achievement and awards its winners hundreds of thousands of dollars. She used the money to co-found the Racial Imaginary Institute which interrogates notions of race and whiteness. Claudia lives in Connecticut with her husband, the photographer and filmmaker John Lucas. DISC ONE: Good as Hell - Lizzo DISC TWO: Stir It Up - Bob Marley & The Wailers DISC THREE: Nightshift - Commodores DISC FOUR: More Than This - Roxy Music DISC FIVE: Can't Take My Eyes Off of You (I Love You Baby) - Lauryn Hill DISC SIX: Kiss - Prince & The Revolution DISC SEVEN: My Favorite Things - John Coltrane DISC EIGHT: The Rhythm Of The Night - Corona BOOK CHOICE: As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner LUXURY ITEM: A solar powered television, playing tennis matches CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Good as Hell - Lizzo Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley
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.
Bill welcomes poet and biographer Matthew Hollis to the show. Matthew is a poet, biographer, editor, and teacher. His first full-length collection Ground Water was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Poetry Award, the Forward Prize for poetry, as well as being a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He is also the author of Now All Roads Lead to France, a critically acclaimed biography of seminal English poet Edward Thomas. His most recent work is Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem.
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.
The winner of this year's Turner Prize will be announced at St George's Hall in Liverpool. Art critic Louisa Buck reflects on this year's Turner Prize and responds to the news of the winner of this prestigious award for contemporary art. Razorlight's Johnny Borrell tells Samira about the band reforming, their new album - Razorwhat? The Best Of Razorlight, and a new documentary, Fall To Pieces, which charts the meteoric rise, break-up and make-up of the band. And poet Kim Moore was recently announced as the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022, for her second collection, All The Men I Never Married. It was described as 'phenomenal' by the judges. She talks about putting the complexities of past relationships and encounters into poetry.
"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
Do you experience disgust at the sight of certain insects? Which ones? Fiona Benson teaches us how to see. Fiona Benson is the author of several poetry collections including Bright Travellers (Jonathan Cape 2014), Vertigo & Ghost (Jonathan Cape 2019), and Ephemeron (Jonathan Cape 2022). She is the winner of the 2015 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Bright Travellers and the Forward Prize for Vertigo & Ghost. In 2019, Fiona collaborated with sound artists Mair Bosworth and Eliza Lomas for an 18-month, singing exploration of the wonders of the insect world as part of the University of Exeter's Urgency Arts Commissions. The series of workshops culminated in a public anthology of poetry sound pieces called “In the Company of Insects.”Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.We're pleased to offer Fiona Benson's poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.Pre-order the forthcoming book Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World and join us in our new conversational space on Substack.
Helen Mort's latest collection, The Illustrated Woman, has just been shortlisted for the Forward Prize, the latest accolade in what has been an incredibly productive year: 2022 has also seen the publication of her memoir of walking and motherhood, A Line above the Sky, and a collaborative lyric essay (with Kate Fletcher), Outfitting, exploring fashion and wild ecology.Caroline Bird's latest book is Rookie, a long-awaited selection gathering material from her seven Carcanet collections – including The Air Year, which won the Forward Prize in 2020. She is also a playwright, and was an official poet for the London Olympics in 2012.Mort and Bird discuss and read from their work.Find upcoming events at the Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/upcomingevents Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Prize-winning poet and playwright Caroline Bird reminds us that “we're all poets when we're asleep. Writing is trying to find a way to dream while we're awake”. On Bob Dylan: “You always hear him choosing the dark side of the road”; “What I love is that his songs are full of denial. Whenever the emotion gets too real, he runs away” and “He's so naïve about love”. On Mr. Tambourine Man, first heard at age eight: “It goes past the point where he's trying to find a truth”. On Dylan's lyrics: “He holds the pain lightly in order for it to resonate”. On a characteristic she shares with Dylan: “Writing is like dancing on hot sand. You can't stand still”.Simon Armitage said of Caroline: “You don't know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word 'BANG' on it”. We do know that we've rarely had more fun recording a podcast.Caroline Bird was one of the five official poets at the 2012 London Olympics. A two-time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Award, her first collection, Looking Through Letterboxes, was published in 2002 - when she was fifteen. Her 2020 collection, The Air Year, won the Forward Prize and was chosen as a Book of the Year by The Guardian and The Telegraph. Her most recent book, Rookie: Selected Poems (2022) is taken from her first six poetry collections. Caroline's plays include her version of Euripedes' The Trojan Women, The Trial Of Dennis the Menace, Chamber Piece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Iphigenia Quartet and Red Ellen.WebsiteTwitterTrailerEpisode playlist on AppleEpisode playlist on SpotifyListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.
Sasha Stiles is a critically-acclaimed poet, artist, AI researcher and innovation strategist probing the intersection of text and technology.Her work has been exhibited in analog and virtual realms, honored in the Future Art Awards, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize and Best of the Net, and published on TezosStiles is also co-creator of NFT poetry gallery theVERSEverse.
This week Ian McMillan and his guests write to uncover previously hidden worlds and consider how to use language to hide in plain sight... Mick Herron is the author of the 'Slough House; series of spy thrillers about a group of discarded and overlooked M15 agents. The first book in the series, Slow Horses has been adapted for TV starring Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, and he has just published the eighth instalment, Bad Actors. Kayo Chingonyi discusses the Black British poetry anthology he has edited; More Fiya, a sequel to the seminal 1998 collection The Fire People, edited by Lemn Sissay. Kayo Chingonyi is a poetry editor at Bloomsbury. He won the Dylan Thomas prize for his debut poetry collection Kumukanda, and his most recent collection A Blood Condition was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the Costa Poetry Award. Hannah Lowe won the Costa Book Award for her poetry collection 'The Kids'. In her chapbook Old Friends, Hannah walks the streets of Limehouse in search of traces of London's first Chinatown. Our 'Something Old, Something New commission this week comes from Sarah Howe, whose debut collection 'Loop of Jade' won the TS Eliot prize. Presenter: Ian McMillan Producer: Jessica Treen
We are delighted to interview Raine Geoghegan. Raine is of mixed heritage, English-Romany, Welsh and Irish. She is a Poet, Prose Writer, Playwright, Voice Over Artist and Performance Coach. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; Forward Prize and Best of the Net, her work has been published internationally both in print and online as well as being widely anthologized, including in Wagtail: The Roma Women's Poetry Anthology. She is the Romani Script Consultant for the musical ‘For Tonight'. Her first full collection, The Talking Stick, will be published soon with Salmon Poetry Press.You can find her work by going to https://www.rainegeoghegan.co.uk/ or following her at @RaineGeoghegan5 on Twitter and @rainegeoghegan on Instagram. Romani crushes for this episode include Dr. Émilie Herbert-Pontonnier, creator of Romani Herstory @romani.herstory, Mike Doherty @mike.doherty.5268 and Lisa Smith @lisa_mezzy of Traveller's Times, Lucy Hetherington and Suzanna King of Friends Families, and Travellers, and Isaac Blake @isaacblake1979 of Romani Arts. Thank you for listening to Romanistan podcast.You can find us on Instagram @romanistanpodcast, and on Facebook under the same name, and on Twitter @romanistanpodWe started a Ko-fi fundraiser to help us expand. Our goal is to release 2 episodes a month, create video content, like an advice column and other treats, and we would also like to register as a nonprofit so we can produce content by other Romani & Sinti creators. We are hoping to cover production costs, like paying for our hosting site, website, editing and producing, and all the rest. We would love it if you could contribute and spread the word. The link, Ko-fi.com/romanistan, is in our bio on Instagram, and will be in the show notesPlease rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us so much. If you would like to advertise with us, email us at romanistanpodcast@gmail.com. We offer sliding-scale for Romani, Sinti & related businesses, so reach out!You can find Jess on Instagram @jezmina.vonthiele, and you can find Jess' vintage and curiosities shop Evil Eye Edit on Instagram @evileyeedit & Etsy.You can find Paulina Verminski on Instagram @_paulina_v_ and at https://romaniholistic.com/. Follow Paulina's store, Romani Holistic, in Corona Del Mar, CA, on Instagram @romaniholistic Romanistan is hosted by Jessica Reidy and Paulina VerminskiConceived of by Paulina VerminskiEdited by CherubWith Music by Viktor PachasAnd Artwork by Elijah Vardo
Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses by James Joyce
Pages 269 - 274 │Scylla & Charybdis, part V│Read by Luke KennardLuke Kennard is a poet and novelist who lectures at the University of Birmingham. His fifth collection, Notes on the Sonnets, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2021.Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LukeKennard*Looking for our author interview podcast? Listen here: https://podfollow.com/shakespeare-and-companySUBSCRIBE NOW FOR EARLY EPISODES AND BONUS FEATURESAll episodes of our Ulysses podcast are free and available to everyone. However, if you want to be the first to hear the recordings, by subscribing, you can now get early access to recordings of complete sections.Subscribe on Apple Podcasts here: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/channel/shakespeare-and-company/id6442697026Subscribe on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/sandcoIn addition a subscription gets you access to regular bonus episodes of our author interview podcast. All money raised goes to supporting “Friends of Shakespeare and Company” the bookshop's non-profit.*Discover more about Shakespeare and Company here: https://shakespeareandcompany.comBuy the Penguin Classics official partner edition of Ulysses here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9780241552636/ulyssesFind out more about Hay Festival here: https://www.hayfestival.com/homeAdam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Find out more about him here: https://www.adambiles.netBuy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-timeDr. Lex Paulson is Executive Director of the School of Collective Intelligence at Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco.Original music & sound design by Alex Freiman.Hear more from Alex Freiman here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1Follow Alex Freiman on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/alex.guitarfreiman/Featuring Flora Hibberd on vocals.Hear more of Flora Hibberd here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5EFG7rqfVfdyaXiRZbRkpSVisit Flora Hibberd's website: This is my website:florahibberd.com and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/florahibberd/ Music production by Adrien Chicot.Hear more from Adrien Chicot here: https://bbact.lnk.to/utco90/Follow Adrien Chicot on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/adrienchicot/Photo of Luke Kennard See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.