Master's in Creative Writing

Category: Alumni News

  • MSt alumna Maya Popa’s “You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave” published

    MSt alumna Maya Popa’s poetry collection You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave has been published by New Michigan Press

    “This is a work of seething precision. In these poems, hope is a meticulous, meditative state—a method of forensic searching and study that is carried with great care across generations. By stitching her raging images together with stillness and poise, Popa asks us to step back from our panic and look: “peeling back the hair, that quiet, necessary artifice, / to reveal a nesting doll of impulses.”

    —Caroline Bird

    “In Maya Catherine Popa’s You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave, feathers are unfulfilled parables, a hen’s eggs turn a vicious red, and a super moon “blooms a tyranny of flowers.” A helix of histories lies threaded to both the present day and the various magics of night. These poems are smart and lush, and at the end of each of them my heart, mind, and ear argue over which was lavished with the most pleasure. I am enchanted by this book, in its thrall, its bright gravity, its terribilitá.”

    —Traci Brimhall

    Buy the collection from  http://www.thediagram.com/nmp/#popa
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  • MSt aluma Elena Kaufman’s “Love Bites” to be serialised on The Pigeonhole


    “An intriguing and diverse set of stories
    An earnest and thoughtfully written collection
    Deftly crafted, these stories are bursting with engaging characters.”

    MSt alumna Elena Kaufman’s short story collection Love Bites is to be serialised on The Pigeonhole. From the announcement:

    “Foreigners, drifters, and eccentrics reach out to strangers in their desire to be witnessed, to be connected, and to find safety in a sea of anonymity.

    Love Bites is a collection of thirteen stories set in Europe and North America. They trace foreigners, drifters and eccentrics linked by their need for acknowledgement and belonging. How do these characters survive physically and psychologically on unfamiliar ground whether as tourists, or strangers in new cities or in new situations which jolt them out of the security of the familiar? Recurring themes are of isolation, loss, and a desire for connection when strangers reach out to other strangers for stability.”

    Visit Love Bites on the Pigeonhole to read the first instalment  for free (from 29th March 2018), and find out how to subscribe.

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  • MSt tutor Jenny Lewis & alumna Romola Parish at Science and Poetry event with St. Hilda’s College, Oxford

    Tickets are now on sale for the third Science and Poetry event at St. Hilda’s College, organised by MSt tutor Jenny Lewis with Sarah Watkinson of St. Hilda’s. The event, on 9 Jun 2018, will feature poets Carrie Etter and Philip Gross and is themed around climate and environmental change. It will include an open mic for poems relating to the theme.
    There will be a free workshop in advance of SciPo 2018, led by alumna Romola Parish and Sarah Watkinson at St Hilda’s College on 17 February, from 10.00-4.00. There will also be an opportunity to enter poems into a competition judged by Jenny Lewis.
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  • MSt alumna Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s “The Island at the End of Everything” shortlisted for Costa and Blue Peter awards, and nominated in The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017

    MSt alumna Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Island at the End of Everything has been shortlisted for the Costa award and the Blue Peter award. It has also been named by Frances Hardinge as one of  The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017 

    From the publisher:

    “From the bestselling author of The Girl of Ink & Stars comes an irresistibly poetic, bittersweet and heartbreaking tale of finding your way home. 

    Amihan lives on Culion Island, where some of the inhabitants – including her mother – have leprosy. Ami loves her home – with its blue seas and lush forests, Culion is all she has ever known. But the arrival of malicious government official Mr Zamora changes her world forever: islanders untouched by sickness are forced to leave. Banished across the sea, she’s desperate to return, and finds a strange and fragile hope in a colony of butterflies. Can they lead her home before it’s too late?”

    About The Island at the End of Everything

     

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