MSt alumna Cassie Gonzales is to be the fiction postgraduate writing fellow at the Emory University Creative Writing Program from fall 2017 to spring 2019.
MSt alumna Maya Catherine Popa’s chapbook The Bees Have Been Cancelled has been selected by the UK Poetry Book Society as their 2017 Summer Pamphlet Choice.
From the PBS announcement:
“The poems in The Bees Have Been Canceled are ravenous, rich, and exquisitely built. Maya Catherine Popa’s language makes visible how yearning tethers the mind to the world and how hurt spawns an astonishing self-awareness. Her gaze alights on beauty and violence; it ‘scurries from birth to blight.’ Such attentive looking brings closer the brokenness of the world. This gaze is also restorative; it alleviates and mends and delights.” – Eduardo C. Corral
“Maya Catherine Popa’s The Bees Have Been Canceled is haunted by violence and catastrophe, by the consequences of human desire turned to incommensurate ends, and anxious about the resources of language. There are no glib answers, only a certain kind of belief (the kind Emily Dickinson might recognize) embodied afresh in poems that are richly textured, and filled with energy, wit, and intelligence. Popa’s work is serious, but there’s joy here, too, in a balance that defies gravity.” -Averill Curdy
MSt tutor Jane Draycott will be reading from “Pearl” and “The Occupant” at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival on the 6th of May 2017, at 5 pm.
From the festival website:
‘Part of the same 14th-century manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, also written in its dialect, Pearl is an intricately wrought 1200-line elegiac poem in which a father grieves for his small daughter, dead before her second birthday. This wrenchingly beautiful vision of love and bereavement has been translated by acclaimed poet Jane Draycott, and, according to The Independent, “The glamour, even glitz, of its view of paradise across the river of death dazzles as never before in modern English”. David Morley described it as “marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild.” The event also includes a reading from Jane’s new collection The Occupant and a chance for questions.”
“Thinking in Stories: Or why the process of reading literature is the antidote to fundamentalism”
Tabish Khair
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Born and educated in Gaya, a small town in Bihar, India, Tabish Khair is the author of various acclaimed books, including the novels The Bus Stopped; Filming: A Love Story; The Thing About Thugs; and How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. He has also published the poetry collections Where Parallel Lines Meet and Man of Glass. In 2016, he published a study The New Xenophobia and a new novel, Just Another Jihadi Jane, to critical acclaim. Khair is currently a Leverhulme guest professor at the School of English, Leeds University.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
MSt alumna Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Girl of Ink & Stars is the overall winner of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2017. It is also the winner in the category Younger Fiction.
From the Waterstone’s website:
“…we’re proud to announce Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s extraordinary debut The Girl of Ink & Stars as the overall winner of our thirteenth Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. Compared by our Children’s buyer Florentyna Martin to the mythical atmosphere of Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Kiran’s storytelling prowess takes a tale already rich with invention and delivers a fantasy of real emotional heft.”
Read more about the prize and the book
Plays by MSt alumna Jingan Young and MSt tutor Amal Chatterjee feature in Jingan Young’s Pokfulam Rd Production’s “”Foreign Goods Last Forever 2: Visions of England””
From the announcement:
“After a sell out show at Theatre503 in November of 2016, Foreign Goods returns with ‘Visions of England’ in April 2017 featuring fully-formed short plays by Chinese, South East Asian playwrights Amal Chatterjee, Kathryn Golding, Stephen Hoo, Amber Hsu, Julie Cheung-Inhin, Cathy Lam, and Jingan Young. The night will include the UK premiere of ‘Trying to Find Chinatown’ by Tony award-winning David Henry Hwang (Chinglish, M. Butterfly).”
More information at Pokfulam Rd Productions, and at Theatre503 (including tickets)
MSt alumnus James Benmore, who won the A.M.Heath Prize, 2010, will be launching the third novel in his Dodger trilogy – Dodger of the Revolution – at the Albion Beatnik Bookstore on Friday 21 April, 2017, from 7.30-9.30pm. James will be joined by fellow novelists Douglas Adamson and Jude Cowan Montague and take part in a discussion about routes into publishing and the ups and downs of getting and staying published. Dodger of the Revolution is now available in book shops and from Amazon.
MSt tutor Jenny Lewis and Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh celebrate the final stages of their four-year, Arts Council-funded ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ collaboration with two events at the Ashmolean Museum on Saturday 1st April, 2017
‘Who Can Climb the Sky?’ and the launch of the ‘Poetry for Peace, 2016’ anthology – words against war by young people of Oxfordshire.
More information on the collaboration webpages.
MSt alumnus James Ellis’ novel The Wrong Story will be launched at Topping & Company in Bath on 6 April 2017.
For more information and to book tickets, visit the event website
MSt alumnus Rory Gleeson is one of three debut writers reading at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation
From the Foundation’s announcement:
“… novelists Rory Gleeson and Alys Conran, and poet Joey Connolly. Roddy Doyle wrote of Gleeson’s debut, ‘Rockadoon Shore is terrific’, while Conran’s novel Pigeon is longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Gregory Award winner Joey Connolly’s first book is just out from Carcanet.”
More about the event from the Anthony Burgess Foundation
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