MSt tutor Nicoletta Demetriou’s collaboration with film maker, Constantinos Terlikkas, ‘The Cypriot Fiddler’, which collects the stories of some of the last surviving professional folk violinists in Cyprus, both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot, has launched a Kickstarter crowd funding appeal. The campaign ends on 31 August 2015.
The Cypriot Fiddler Kickstarter Campaign
The Cypriot Fiddler on Facebook
Helen Rumbelow of The Times interviewed MSt Tutor Alice Jolly about her book “Dead Babies and Seaside Towns”. You can read the article in The Times (behind paywall).
Inspires magazine describes Roopa Farooki’s novel, The Good Children as “”Evocative of generational change this book probes into the saga of the South Asian migrant experience, and portrays a world of both compassion and violence, and love and loss.”
Read the full recommendation.
MSt tutor Jane Draycott’s podcast for the Royal Literary Fund on the characters and personae poets meet in their writing is now available at the RLF site (http://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/wa_episode21/)
Other People’s Countries by MSt tutor Patrick McGuiness is the Wales Book of the Year for 2015.
Announcing the award, by Literature Wales and judged this year by Alex Clark, Tessa Hadley and Paul Henry, Paul Henry said:
“The stylistic quality of this brilliant, lyrical memoir is best described through a simile from the book where a bracelet of water “doesn’t run over the stones but flexes like clear muscle over its riverbed.” It’s a poet’s prose at its best – perfectly paced, effortless in its devices. Tender, humorous, moving and, in places, profound, Other People’s Countries reminds us how great writing approaches the essence of Memory.”
Read more about this at the Wales Book of the Year site.
MSt alumna Maya Popa has won the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.
“The £5000 First Prize in the Open Category was awarded to teacher and writer Maya Catherine Popa from New York City for a poem inspired by her neuroscientist great grandfather”
Read about her and the other winners.
2015 International Man Book Prize winner Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai “has chosen to split the £15,000 translator’s prize between two translators, George Szirtes (who translated Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance) and Ottilie Mulzet (who translated Seiobo There Below). Szirtes is a Hungarian-born poet who came to the UK as a refugee. He has won a number of prizes for his poetry, including the T S Eliot Prize. He has also translated Sándor Márai amongst others.”
Read more about László Krasznahorkai and the prize here.
MSt tutor Wendy Brandmark’s novel The Stray American has been longlisted for the 2015 Jerwoord Fiction Uncovered prize.
“The Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize today (Tuesday 12 May) announces its longlist of 15 books which showcase the breadth and vibrancy of British writing today. Now in its 5th year, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize is unique in its aim to celebrate great British fiction…”
Read more about it on the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered page, and read Wendy’s post for this blog: “On Letting go of a Novel“
Bette Adriaanse on writing, the course and getting published
In the second year of the Master in Creative Writing, I started writing what would become my first novel, Rus Like Everyone Else. There was no plan, I only had a few characters that had slowly emerged from my experience living in Amsterdam and London. Those characters had been wandering around inside my head for a while and their stories seemed to be connected somehow. There was a lonely secretary waiting for her life to start, an elderly man with agoraphobia, a granny with a soap-opera addiction, a young immigrant trying to make it, and Rus, a young man who had to start taking part in society after living the first twenty five years of his life under the radar.
I was living on a small farm in Devon when I began writing the novel, where I helped with the horses in the morning and tuned into the city-life of my characters in the afternoon. At first I was worried that being in the countryside I would only get ideas for stories about fields and horses, but the distance to my everyday life gave me the space to fantasize and create a fictional city.
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