MSt alumni Daisy Johnson and Kiran Millwood Hargrave have been shortlisted for Blackwell’s Book of the Year for Daisy’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Everything Under (Jonathan Cape) and Kiran’s The Way Past Winter (Chicken House).

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/johnson-and-millwood-hargrave-battle-it-out-blackwells-book-year-885076

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MSt alumni Majella Kelly and Art Allen have won First and Third Prizes respectively, in the Ambit Poetry Competition. The poems, on the theme of ‘Home’ and judged by Malika Booker, are available to read online.

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(from The Guardian)

The Guardian’s podcast with MSt alumna Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Jessie Burton talking about feminist fairytales is available online.

From the announcement:

“On this week’s show, we’re talking feminist fairytales with Jessie Burton and Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Burton’s latest book, The Restless Girls, is a feminist retelling of the Brothers Grimm story The Twelve Dancing Princesses. In the Grimms’ original, a dozen nameless sisters are punished and forced into marriage because they love to dance. Among many changes, Burton gives each of the 12 women at the heart of the story a name – and a racing-driver mother.

Millwood Hargrave’s third book, The Way Past Winter, is not a retelling of a particular fairytale. Inspired by Scandinavian and Slavic folklore, Hargrave tells the story of three sisters who go searching for their missing brother in a magical and dangerous land. Both authors explain the importance of giving their female characters agency, the details they changed to subvert traditional fairytales, and how they deal with male readers who hesitate to read their books.”

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Jane Draycott and Jenny Lewis: Recalibrating the Classics

MSt alumna Maya Popa interviewed MSt tutors Jane Draycott & Jenny Lewis for Carcanet blog, which is now available to read online.

From the announcement;
“This week on the blog, Jenny Lewis and Jane Draycott talk to Maya C. Popa about their translations Gilgamesh Retold and Pearl. As part of the Bookblast Tour 2018, the pair will be discussing their work in Claiming the Great Tradition: Women Recalibrate the Classics at Waterstones, Manchester on Thursday 8 November. We’d love to see you there. 

For more information, head over to our Facebook event.

Jenny Lewis is an Anglo-Welsh poet, playwright, songwriter, children’s author and translator who teaches poetry at Oxford University. She trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

She has published two collections with Oxford Poets/Carcanet, Fathom (2007) andTaking Mesopotamia (2014). Lewis is currently completing a PhD on Gilgamesh at Goldsmiths. Her translation Gilgamesh Retold is due out this October.

Jane Draycott studied at King’s College London and Bristol University. Her first full collection, Prince Rupert’s Drop was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 1999. In 2002 she was the winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and in 2004, the year of her second collection, The Night Tree, she was nominated as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ list of poets. Her third collection, Over was shortlisted for the 2009 T.S. Eliot Prize. 

 

She lives in Oxfordshire and is a tutor on postgraduate writing programmes at Oxford University and Lancaster University. 

Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American poet and the author of two chapbooks, The Bees Have Been Canceled, and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave. She holds degrees from Oxford University, New York University, and Barnard College. She directs the Creative Writing Program and teaches English Literature at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City.

Jenny Lewis and Jane Draycott

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MSt tutor Roopa Farooki’s work features in three new anthologies coming out in 2018:

The Asian Writer, A Decade (Dahlia Press), to be launched at the Asian Writer Festival 2018 (Oct 20th)

Paper Mirrors, (Crocus/Commonword), to be launched at the Commonword Prize for Children’s Fiction, 2018 (Dec 12th)

In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani English Literature 1998-2017, (OUP, ed. Muneeza Shamsie), launch 2019.

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