MSt director Dr Clare Morgan shared her thoughts on “The Hidden Power of Poetry to Make Better Entrepreneurs” with the Wall Street Journal . The article (paywall) is available here.
MSt tutor James Womack’s translation of Manuel Vilas “Heaven” has been published by Carcanet. He has also written a blog post about it.
From the announcement:
A collection of dark, funny Iberian poems about drinking, sex and death.
Manuel Vilas speaks in the voice of bitter experience, experience which seems intent on sending him up. He is a novelist as well as a poet, and his poems tell stories as the speaker moves quixotically across the map and between romances. His instinct for rhythm gives the reader a firm sense of place and tone. Universal in their concerns, taking in love and the end of love, life and the end of life, the poems are also resolutely Spanish in how they speak – bluntly, humorously – always alert for the fantastic.
This is the first translation of Vilas’s two major collections Heaven (El cielo, 2000) and Heat (Calor, 2008) into English. Thematically fuelled with alcohol, death and sex, they go off into free-wheeling megalomaniacal flights of fantasy. The translator, James Womack, has won prizes for his versions of Vilas and of the Russian poet Mayakovsky.”
You can read about the book, and buy it here.
MSt tutor Jane Draycott and MSt alumnus Luke Allen have won second and third TLS Mick Imlah Poetry Prizes, respectively. You can read the poems and about the prize here.
MSt alumnus Arthur Allen’s verse novel The Nurseryman has been published by Kernpunkt Press.
From the announcement:
“The Nurseryman is a verse novel told in polyphony as the collected account of a 17th Century voyage to Meta Incognita – the absolutely unknown ice-land at the top of the world. A composite of original sources and collected accounts of medieval voyages, The Nurseryman is a postmodern travel compendium that explores the hidden, magical worlds within our own.”
An extraordinary debut that combines the awed wonder of early seafarers with a freshness and buoyancy that is essentially 21st century. Alternating between the late sixteenth century ‘FRAGMENTARY records of a Roote Gatherer, practiced of alchemical craft & in the spiritual use of fruit trees…’, lyrical meditations on the beauty of nature, and notes on rsome of the marvels encountered during the voyage (such as how female whales are snared by their protectiveness towards their offspring), The Nurseryman takes us on a startlingly original odyssey that is at once an homage to the past as well as being a prescient ‘fable for the present.“
– Jenny Lewis, author of Gilgamesh Retold
For more information, and to order The Nurseryman, visit Kernpunkt Press.
MSt alumna Jingan Young’s play “Life and Death of a Journalist” is on at the Vault Festival, London from 25 Feb – 1 Mar 2020.
From the announcement:
“Award-winning playwright Jingan Young makes a ferocious return to theatre with a new play on sex, censorship and the ethics of journalism – how much are you willing to sacrifice? The play is directed by Max Lindsay and stars Lucy Roslyn in the title role, writer/performer of the hit show Orlando which won the VAULT Festival’s Outstanding New Work Award in 2019.”
For more information and tickets, visit the Vault announcement.
MSt alumnus Sam Guglani’s “Medicine Unboxed” is now a podcast on SoundCloud.
“Medicine Unboxed aims to inspire debate and medicine and to inform its culture.
Medicine Unboxed is for the public, for health professionals and for all of us who will be patients one day. Despite scientific advances, medicine faces moral, political and social challenges that require the pursuit of meaning as much as knowledge. The arts and other disciplines can help to illuminate the central questions and to foster awe, empathy and humility.
Our annual events – Unboxed (2009), Stories (2010), Values (2011), Belief (2012), Voice (2013), Frontiers (2014), Mortality (2015), Wonder (2016), Maps (2017)and Love (2018) – each have drawn audiences of over three hundred people. Our Soundcloud and Vimeo archives have been seen and heard by tens of thousands of people.
“Our speakers are writers, politicians, philosophers, scientists, musicians and performers. The events are theatrical, moving and challenging and are performances in themselves.
MSt alumna Dahmicca Wright’s poem “Playing Dead” has been shortlisted for White Review Poet’s Prize 2019 .
MSt alumna Mariah Whelan’s “the love i do to you” will be launched by Eyewear Books on 26 November 2019.
From the announcement:
“In this genre-bending debut Mariah Whelan tells the love story of ‘He’ and ‘She’. Once lovers and now… something else, in this collection of sonnets the poems roam across the UK, Europe, Japan and South Korea to explore the oldest of lyric subjects – love, desire, friendship and betrayal. Painful, playful and sensual, these poems explore the bonds that tie lovers and friends together in a collection of startling formal energy and emotional candour.
Mariah Whelan is a poet from Oxford. Her poems appear in The
Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual 2019, Best New British and Irish
Poets 2018, The Poetry Book
Society website, The
Interpreter’s House and elsewhere. Her writing has been shortlisted for
The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and has won The AM Heath
Prize. Mariah has degrees from Queen’s University Belfast and The
University of Oxford, and she currently holds a PhD research scholarship
at
The University of Manchester where she is writing a new
collection of poems and researching trauma and representation in
contemporary Irish fiction.
The admirable achievement of Mariah Whelan’s the love i do to you lies not just in its page-turning fusion of lyrical poetics and dramatic narration, but in the moving power of its steady and intimate candour. Whelan’stransformative sense of scene
– ‘your words like trolleys / half-submerged in the river-clay and weeds’ – is never less than compelling, its psychological alertness quietly propulsive from start to finish. — Jane Draycott”
See the Eyewear website for more information
Details of the launch in London, 26 November
MSt alumna Sarvat Hasin has been awarded the Mo Siewcharran Prize for unpublished authors from BAME backgrounds.
From the announcement:
“Sarvat Hasin has won the inaugural Mo Siewcharran Prize for unpublished authors from BAME backgrounds, securing a deal with Dialogue Books.
The award, named in memory of Nielsen Book’s director of marketing and communications, was announced at Hachette UK’s Carmelite House offices on Monday evening (4th November).
Hasin, a former PR worker for Hachette Children’s Books who now works for the Almedia Theatre, also won £2,500 and will see her debut novel The Giant Dark published in 2021.
She said: “Thank you very much to Dialogue Books because I think this prize is incredible and I think it’s doing something that’s really important in the industry and more than a lot of the conversations that I think are happening at a lot of publishing houses that are maybe more box-ticking. I think what Dialogue is doing is literally putting their money where their mouth is and that’s really important.”
Congratulating the other shortlisted authors, she thanked those who had supported her. She said: “Writing a book, particularly before you have a publishing contract or any idea of how to write a book can be a devastatingly lonely thing and the best thing you can have is people who support you and who believe in you.”
Alien, Go Home by Temitope Owolabi was named second runner-up, winning £1,500, while Suparna Mansions by Vasundra Tailor finished third. The works were chosen from around 185 submissions, whittled down to an eight-strong shortlist who each got a bag of Dialogue books and a copy of On Writing by Stephen King (Hodder).
The winners were judged by a panel featuring Candice Carty-Williams, Guy Gunaratne, Curtis Brown agent Catherine Cho, Dialogue publisher Sharmaine Lovegrove and Viki Cheung, co-chair of THRIVE.”
Read more at the Bookseller
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