
MSt tutor Caroline Bird’s collection In these Days of Prohibition has been shortlisted for 2017 TS Eliot prize.
The winner of the Prize will be announced on Monday 15th January 2018.

MSt tutor Caroline Bird’s collection In these Days of Prohibition has been shortlisted for 2017 TS Eliot prize.
The winner of the Prize will be announced on Monday 15th January 2018.

MSt alumna Mary-Jane Holmes has won 2017 Bridport Prize for Poetry for “Siren Call”.
More information: a list of all the winners, and a note about Mary-Jane Holmes.
Mary-Jane’s debut poetry collection will be published by Pindrop Press in 2018.
MSt tutor Rebecca Abrams’ article complementing her book, The Jewish Journey: 4,000 Years in 22 Objects, is in The Observer of 15th October 2017.
From The Observer :
Endeavours of the Mind
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Peter Moore is a writer, historian and critic. His debut Damn His Blood was published by Chatto & Windus in 2012 and was chosen as a Radio 4 Book of the Week. His second book, The Weather Experiment, was a Sunday Times Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015 and was adapted by BBC 4 for a three-part television documentary. He reviews regularly for The Literary Review and has been a writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire. In 2016 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship for his third book, Endeavour, which will be published in 2018.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
“Failsafe: the value of getting it wrong”
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Helen Mort was born in Sheffield. She has published two poetry collections with Chatto & Windus, ‘Division Street’ (2013) and ‘No Map Could Show Them’ (2016). She won the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize for best first collection in 2014. Helen has a volume of short stories forthcoming from Wrecking Ball and a novel forthcoming from Chatto. She is a core creative tutor on Oxford’s MSt in Creative Writing. She also teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
MSt tutor Helen Mort’s two new radio commissions, broadcast on BBC Radio3, are now available to listen to online on iPlayer:
The Essay – Cornerstones: Millstone http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04n84h6
Between The Ears – Give me Space Beneath my Feet http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b096g27p (part of last weekend’s ‘Contains Strong Language‘ Festival)

(Photo: Lionfish in an aquarium, from BBC website)
MSt alumna Kent DePinto’s programme, “The Fish that Ate Florida”, originally on BBC World Service’s Life Stories on 1st October 2017, is now available to listen to online.
From the BBC:
“As part of the BBC Life Stories season, exploring our relationship with the natural world, we travel under the sea in pursuit of a major ecological threat to Western Atlantic coasts – the Lionfish.
The species, which recently spread from its natural territory in the Pacific to Atlantic waters, is aggressive, exotic and very, very hungry. Kent DePinto explores how lionfish went from being an aquarium favourite to the scourge of an aquatic ecosystem as it eats everything in its path – with no natural predators in these seas to control it. She meets the people who have made it their life’s work to eradicate lionfish from Florida waters, in an underwater journey of spears, guns, and survival of the fittest.
Kent explores the tight-knit and sometimes unlikely partnerships of conservationists, scientists, and competitive spear-fishermen and women, as they band together to combat one of the biggest challenges American and Caribbean coral reefs have faced.”
MSt tutor Rebecca Abram’s The Jewish Journey: 4000 years in 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum has been published by the Ashmolean Museum, (ISBN 978-1-910807-03-3).
Read more about it/buy it online from the Ashmolean online shop.
MSt tutor Roopa Farooki will be the keynote speaker at the Asian Writer Festival on 21 October, at the Royal Asiatic Society. Roopa will also be doing a panel on relationships in literary fiction. Twitter link and eventbrite links below.
https://mobile.twitter.com/i/web/status/907529273208078336
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-asian-writer-festival-tickets-37684746090/amp

There will be a rehearsed reading of MSt tutor Ben Brown’s play The Promise on November 2 at the JW3 in Hampstead. The reading will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Jonathan Freedland,
From the JW3 announcement:
“On the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, JW3 presents a rehearsed reading of The Promise, a play dramatising this momentous historical moment.
November 2, 1917. The Balfour Declaration is signed, signalling the British government’s support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. It’s the beginning of World War I and Herbert Samuel – the first practising Jew ever to sit in a British Cabinet – dreams of using British power to back a return of the Jews to Palestine. His cousin and fellow Cabinet member, Edwin Montagu, is implacably opposed to the idea. Politics, religion and love collide with explosive effect in Ben Brown’s acclaimed play about the origins of Israel.
Directed by Richard Beecham.”
Visit the webpage for more information and tickets.