MSt alumnus Nabin Chhetri has been commissioned to write a poem for Stanza, Scotland’s International Poetry Festival. More details at the Stanza site
MSt alumna Laura Theis collecttion “How to Extricate Yourself” has been published by Dempsey & Windle
From the announcement:
“What would it be like to be a writer in residence on the moon? Or to wake up with hair made out of spiders? To move in with a dragon? Or to raise a demon baby by accident? Simultaneously dark and funny, these poems let the reader escape into the realm of the imagination and the fantastical. Unafraid of asking ‘what if…’, the poems’ various speakers and narrative voices try to make sense of their narrowing world and sleepless nights through self-deception and make-believe, spells and incarnations, peeks into the possibilities of other worlds and lives.
Besides being awarded the 2020 Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize, the poems in this collection have won or been shortlisted for the Acumen Poetry Prize, the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, three consecutive Live Canon International Poetry Awards, the Hammond House Award, the Yeovil Prize, the Wirral Poetry Festival Competition, the Blue Nib Chapbook Contest, the Yaffle Prize, the Charroux Prize andthe Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize judged by Jackie Kay.
Praise for ‘how to extricate yourself’:
“How to Extricate Yourselfcombines vivid narrative, seriousness and delight in language that moves easily between wry imaginative energy and resonant pathos. This is a debut collection of admirable wit and invention, and introduces Laura Theis – already a successful fiction writer – as a poet of distinctive new voice.”
– Jane Draycott
“No one else does weird and tender quite like Laura Theis.”
– Kiran Millwood Hargrave
“Grabbed me not just for the overall quality from poem to poem but also from line to line… I could have read these poems all night and still have read some more.”
– Paul McGrane, who selected Laura Theis as the winner of the 2020 Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize
“A witty and playful collection from a gifted poet who blends delicate lyricism with candid confession. An engaging and fresh new voice.”
– Anna Saunders, 2020 Wirral Prize Judge & CEO of Cheltenham Poetry Festival
“In these poems which sing and see from a distance, Laura Theis is in complete control of tone – never forced or rushed, convinced the gentlemen callers will leave having not detected the fire in the grates of the witchy girls…. It is a book of entrances and exits – the astronaut’s wife, a lover on the moon – reports from a world where jellyfish are admirable, space and distance present both in the barely punctuated lines and between partner and partner. These poems are resourceful and magical, tracing infinity ‘the way bees love to eat / honey but also make honey.’“
– Matt Bryden, Judge of the 2020 Charroux Prize
“A sparkling debut…a small treasure box filled with surprising, unusual jewels.”
– Christina Houen, Perfect Words
The book is available directly from the publisher https://www.dempseyandwindle.com/lauratheis.html(or through Waterstones / Amazon )
MSt tutor Ella Hickson has been shortlisted for the Paines Plough inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting
MSt tutor Jane Draycott has been made Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
MSt tutor Jamie Mckendrick’s “The Years” has been shortlisted for the 2020 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets.
From the announcement
“The judges admired these poems for their formal accomplishment, quiet erudition, variety of theme and engaging introspection. But, beyond that, it was the complex and various interplay between the poems and McKendrick’s own ink and watercolour pictures that marked this pamphlet out as being a truly singular achievement. Reader and viewer become caught up in the profound similarities and differences there are between poem and picture; they also become transfixed by subtle, sometimes sombre, hued world the two of them create.”
You can read about the shortlist here.
MSt alumnus David Shook’s Barcode Scanner has won the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival’s Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance.
From the announcement:
“The Prize for the Best Film for Tolerance, donated by the Federal Foreign Ministry, has been awarded to the film A Barcode Scanner (IRQ 2019) by David Shook, based on the poem of the same name by Zêdan Xelef. From the jury citation: “The poetic voice and the cinematographical eye become mediums against oppression and despair by simply simply and clearly scanning what is there, repeatedly and impeccably, like the barcodes of a condensed everyday life experience.”
MSt alumna MJ Holmes’s novella Don’t Tell the Bees , which won the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award has been published by Ad Hoc Fiction.
The judge of the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award , Michael Loveday, said:
“WThe winning novella is a story of a young girl (called No-more) and a village community in France, around the time of the Second World War. It’s full of nostalgia for old rural ways, and, in passing, a nuanced description of the impact of industrial progress. There’s a charming fairy-tale quality, a satisfying come-uppance for a villainous character, and every page positively oozes with fondness for its characters. The novella adopts a classic novella-in-flash form, with each chapter a self-contained world of its own, a distinct moment in time, but its absolute originality is expressed in the characters’ eccentric qualities, the richly textured language, the blending of history with fable, and the way that its fragments collectively evoke the whole story of a village and way of life. Amongst a raft of brilliant manuscripts, this was the story I found myself most eagerly returning to, cherishing each time the writer’s deft skills. “
MSt alumna M J Holmes’ pamphlet “Dihedral” has been published by Live Canon.
From the announcement:
“Joint winner of the 2020 Live Canon Pamphlet Competition.
A
Forward Prize nominee and Hawthornden Fellow, Mary-Jane has won the
Bridport Poetry prize, the Bath Novella-in-Flash Prize, the Martin
Starkie Poetry Prize, Dromineer Fiction Prize, the Reflex Fiction and
Mslexia Flash prize as well as the Bedford Poetry competition. In 2020,
she was shortlisted for the Beverley International Prize for Literature
and longlisted for the UK National Poetry Prize. Mary-Jane’s debut
poetry collection Heliotrope with Matches and Magnifying Glass is published by Pindrop Press.
Her work appears in anthologies including Best Small Fictions 2014/16/18 and Best Microfictions 2020 and in a variety of publications including Magma, Mslexia, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Lonely Crowd, and Prole. “
You can read about it and order it here.
MSt alumna Kiran Millwood-Hargraves’ The Deathless Girls has been nominated for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2021.
See the list of nominees, and read about The Deathless Girls
MSt tutor James Womack’s long poem Homunculus , based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian, has been published by Carcanet Press.
From the announcement:
“Homunculus is a long poem from award-winning poet and translator James Womack, based around the Elegies of the Roman poet Maximian. The last of the Roman poets, Maximian wrote in the sixth century, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; critics have called his Elegies ‘one of the strangest documents of the human mind’, and W.H. Auden singled him out as a ‘really remarkable poet’. Womack’s versioning of the Elegies shows how this harsh poem of sex and old age can speak to our own contemporary, collapsing world.”
‘This interpretation of the Elegies puts a modern spin on the serious nature of content, creating a rhythmic flow of references woven into the pacing of the poem […] Womack’s Homunculus is brutally, even indecently honest about the titular character’s feelings and thoughts.’
Allen Chiu, DURA Dundee
Praise for James Womack‘With an ear finely tuned to colloquial speech and a knack for deadpan delivery, Womack gives Vilas’ poems a thoroughly convincing new life in English’
Jennifer Barber, The Critical Flame
‘James Womack’s translations are immaculate distillations of Vilas… Vilas’ poems are long and decadent affairs, euphoric tales of drunken debauchery told through a first person narrative.’
Charlie Baylis, Stride Magazine
‘Vilas is an accomplished, freewheeling storyteller, forever leading his readers into unexpected byways…James Womack’s translations of these beguiling narrative poems, selected from two of Vilas’ collections published in 2000 and 2008, are so vivid, natural-seeming and alert to every nuance and shade of feeling that they scarcely register as translations at all.’
Paul Bailey, Literary Review
‘witty, nuanced, urbane’
Clark Allison, Stride Magazine
‘True to its title, On Trust: A Book of Lies explores the metamorphic landscapes of shifting allegiance and unstable epistemologies. Writing a cunning jazz line in one poem and a supple passage of lyric prose in the next, Womack matches limberness of method to his ambitious subject: the shifting instabilities of character, circumstance, and faith.’
Judges, Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize for Second Collections
‘This is a gorgeous book. The reader will find it either a seductive introduction or a thrilling reunion. James Womack’s translations are bristling with appropriate vigour.’
The Spokesman
In James Womack’s ‘book of lies’, in the court of love and the erotic, where honesty may be a necessary contrivance, the speaker is both accuser and accused. The poems display a wry, mordant romanticism which manages to be at war with itself while keeping a keen eye on the imaginative opportunities. On Trust is a witty, eloquent, troubling collection.’
Sean O’Brien ‘The first half of On Trust is about a love affair, which is true to all the stumbles of falling in love. An actual affair? Or a vivid thought-experiment? It is both and neither. It is Schrödinger’s pussy. It is and it isn’t. ‘In your park, the wind pushes at an empty swing.’ Inventive, clever, funny, rueful, ironic, hypnotised by the erotic.’
Craig Raine ‘Technically adept, self-consciously ironic, and provocative about the nature of art and the role of the artist… Often I felt as if I was being taken aside and told a joke that’s ridiculously funny at the same time as being deadly serious. ‘
Heidi Williamson, Eyewear‘James Womack is another bright young poet… he is capable of lugubrious comic inventions such as ‘From the Literary Encyclopaedia’, which charts an experimental novelist’s doomed career, alongside ‘Tourism’, a clipped and chilly poem about the export of jihadis to the Middle East… on the evidence of Misprint Womack has scope, curiosity and a refreshing sense of not having foresuffered everything he encounters.’
Sean O’Brien, The Sunday Times ‘In ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky’ and Other Poems the poet James Womack has put together the comprehensive selection of Mayakovsky’s poems I have long been waiting for. His fresh translation allows English readers to appreciate the non-aligned and passionate personality of the Russian poet. I recommend a few lines twice a day to protect against dry academic writing.’
The Times Higher Education Best Books of 2016
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