Photo from Eve White agency
MSt alumna Daisy Johnson’s short story “Blood Rites” has been longlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. The shortlist will be announced on March 19th, and the winner on April 27th.
MSt alumna Sarvat Hasin’s debut novel, “This Wide Night” will be launched at Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford on 17th March 2017.
“A retelling of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Little Women’, but transported to 1970s Karachi, this stunning new novel presents a quiet, seething world of four women in the subcontinent.
Sarvat Hasin was born in London and grew up in Karachi. She studied politics at Royal Holloway, and wrote her debut novel whilst studying for a Creative Writing masters at the University of Oxford. She has also worked as a bookseller and at publishing houses. Her short stories, essays and poetry have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including The Mays Anthology, Diverse Quarterly, Catweazle Magazine and Dawn Newspaper.“
Fri 17 March 2017
7:00 – 8:30 pm
Blackwell’s Bookshop, 51 Broad Street, Oxford
Attendance free, registration required. For more information, visit this page.
The Jhalak Prize “seeks to celebrate books by British/British resident BAME writers, and the overall winner will be presented with a prize of £1,000. The shortlist consists of fiction, YA, non-fiction, debuts, short stories and genre.”
This year’s judges are author and co-founder of the award, Sunny Singh (chair), YA author Catherine Johnson, author and poet Alex Wheatle MBE, poet and broadcaster Musa Okwonga and Booker-longlisted fiction writer Yvvette Edwards.
For more about the prize and the shortlist, visit the Jhalak Prize website. The winner will be announced on 17th March 2017.
For more about The Girl of Ink and Stars, visit the publisher’s page.
MSt alumna Sabyn Javeri’s novel Nobody Killed Her (HarperCollins, 2017) was launched at Karachi Literature Festival on Saturday 11th February 2017. The novel is available to pre-order on Amazon.
Jan Wagner Image: Alberto Novelli, Villa Massimo
The Poetry Society Annual Lecture in partnership with New College Oxford, by the German poet and translator, Jan Wagner.
“Jan Wagner is the outstanding German poet of his generation. His lecture, delivered in English, is on influence and the exchange of poetic ideas across borders; of the teachers poets must find for themselves (and then distance themselves from again). Interspersed with readings of some of his own poems, Wagner’s lecture draws on poets such as Rimbaud, Heym and Brecht, Popa, Pound and Hughes, and the poet-translators who have carried their work between cultures.
Wagner’s collection Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees (Arc), translated by Iain Galbraith, won the Popescu European Poetry Translation Prize 2015. He has translated into German poets including Armitage, MacNeice, Shapcott, Simic and Sweeney.”
New College, Oxford. Monday 20 February 2017, 7.00 – 8.30 pm
Tickets free, RSVP to Oliver Fox by email to marketing@poetrysociety.org.uk
Catherine Higgins-Moore’s Strange Roof by Finishing Line Press in May 2017, in the New Women’s Voices Series.
‘Catherine Higgins-Moore’s use of language to embolden and communicate experience inspires and excites. She is not afraid of anything. Her confident gritty flair inks life into a world both known and unknown. A joy resides in these pages. A bold and fearless joy.’
-Lisa O’Donnell, The Death of Bees, Winner of the 2013 Commonwealth Book Prize
For more information and to pre-order, visit Finishing Line Press.
MSt alumna Maya Popa’s chapbook, The Bees Have Been Canceled: Poems, has been published by New Michigan Press.
‘this remarkable chapbook [is]…annunciatory and regenerative…continually making anew the world it describes’ (Jamie McKendrick)
‘a terrific new voice in poetry, cerebral, distinctive and urbane…’ (Thomas McCarthy)
The Bees Have Been Canceled is available on Amazon.
The first of four weekly lectures by distinguished poet Sean O’Brien, Visiting Humanitas-Weidenfeld Professor, is on Tuesday 7th February.
Schedule:
Tuesday 7 February 2017 ‘For dreams are licensed as they never were’. What becomes of the history poem?
Tuesday 14 February 2017 Displacement: Irish poetry and poets of Irish descent in Britain.
Tuesday 21 February 2017 ‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’ or ‘The Faster We Go the Rounder We Get’.
Tuesday 28 February 2017 In Conversation with Patrick McGuinness
The lectures take place at 5.30 in the Mary Ogilvie Lecture Theatre at St Anne’s College. The first lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome, no need to book.
“Tango in Stanzas: The Path from Page to Stage”
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary.
Is there a difference between a performance poet and a poet who performs their work? In 2015 poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch won an Arts Council Creative Wales Award to write, perform and dance Tango in Stanzas, an exploration of poetic metre through the medium of dance. Samantha will trace her creative journey to this performance piece, charting how her poetry has evolved from being primarily page-based to stage-based and examine the way this development has in turn impacted on her creative process.
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch has published three collections of poetry. Her work has been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year (Not in These Shoes, Picador 2008), the Roland Mathias Prize (Banjo, Picador 2012) and the Michael Marks Award (Lime & Winter, Rack 2014). Samantha’s poems have appeared in Granta, the Financial Times, the Independent and Poetry Wales. She runs a writers’ retreat on the Wales Coastal Path www.writebythecoast.co.uk.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
“Spitfire Kitchen” by MSt tutor Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch was shortlisted for the 2016 Live Canon International Poetry Competition.
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