MSt tutor Jenny Lewis (Sur le Pont des Arts), alumna Alexandra Strnad (The Eyemouth Tapestry and November) and student Majella Kelly (Clipping A Cockatiel’s Wings (for Dummies)) were all finalists for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2017.
“Finding a Voice and Losing it Again: Influence, Expectation and Identity”
Maura Dooley
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Maura Dooley’s most recent collection of poetry is The Silvering (Bloodaxe). Anthologies she has edited include The Honey Gatherers: Love Poems and How Novelists Work. In 2015 she was Poet-in-Residence at the Jane Austen House Museum, Chawton. Her poems from the residency are published as a pamphlet: A Quire of Paper. In 2014 she published a pamphlet of versions (with Elhum Shakerifa) of work by the exiled Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman. She has twice been short-listed for the TS Eliot Award and twice for the Forward Single Poem Award. Her work has received an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. She has directed Literature festivals, worked with Jim Henson film and Performing Arts Labs and currently teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
MSt student Camille Ralphs’ Malkin (Emma Press) has been shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for new poetry pamphlets, awarded by the British Library with the Wordsworth Trust.
MSt tutor Anna Beer’s Sounds and Sweet Airs has been chosen by Anthony Tomassini, chief classical music critic of The New York Times, as one of his Gift Ideas for Classical Music Fans.
“The Poetry for Peace project is aimed at building bridges between English and Arabic-speaking communities. Generously supported by Arts Council England, Oxford University Museums and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the project involved poets Adnan al-Sayegh and Jenny Lewis working with over sixty 11-17 year olds from four Oxford schools on themes of heritage and peace”
The Letters Page, a digital literary journal in letters edited by Jon McGregor, is now available as a limited edition boxed set published by, and with cover design by, MSt alumna Ioanna Mavrou, in collaboration with Thodoris Tzalavras:
“Contents:
Letters from: George Saunders, Clare Wigfall, Éireann Lorsung, Joanna Walsh, Andrey Kurkov, Naomi Alderman, Sam Riviere, Cassie Gonzales, Kevin Barry, Karen McLeod, Claudia Reed, S E Craythorne, Maria Papas, and Ken Sears.”
The Letters Page Vol. 1, Edited by Jon McGregor
Book design by Ioanna Mavrou & Thodoris Tzalavras
Boxed set contains book and loose-leaf letter reproductions
Limited Edition: 500 copies
Book Ex Machina, Nicosia, November 2016
ISBN 978-9963-9858-6-9
€ 29.95
MSt tutor Jane Draycott’s poetry is to feature in London Underground’s Poems on the Underground,
(Series image credit Paul Wolfgang Webster)
Podcasts of lectures and public engagements by Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry Simon Armitage, poet, playwright and novelist, are available as podcasts.
Episodes include “Access All Areas: Poetry and the Underworld”, “On Lists”) “Mind the Gap: Negation and ‘a final revelation of horrible Nothingness -‘” , “The Parable of the Solicitor and the Poet”.
Creative Writing Seminar Series
Kellogg College Centre for Creative Writing
Mawby Room, Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
Michaelmas Term Week 7: Thursday 24 November 2016
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Women, just as much as men, believed and believe the stories we tell ourselves about genius. The composer and pianist Clara Wieck, soon to be married to (the tortured genius) Robert Schumann wrote: ‘I once thought I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – not one has been able to do it, and why should I expect to?’
Anna Beer, author of Sounds and Sweet Airs: the Forgotten Women of Classical Music, will talk about the ways she as a writer set out to challenge Clara’s despair. She will argue that recovering a female tradition (whether in music or in literature) is only the first step, that – in the words of one scholar – it is not enough simply to rewrite history ‘on the principle of add women and stir’.
Beer will explore the possibility of casting aside the usual biographical pegs upon which we hang a creative woman’s life, whether the nun taken from the world, the sacrificial wife, or the maiden aunt. Perhaps it’s time to break the old story, and find new ways to tell the lives of creative powerful women.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan http://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/researchcentres/CW
MSt tutor Jane Draycott’s new collection, The Occupant, which is a Poetry Society Recommendation, will be published by Carcanet Press on 24th November 2016.
“‘I’ve waited some time to read something this intelligent, this sensuous and this crystalline.’ – The Guardian on The Night Tree
‘The language is marvellously modulated yet stirringly wild. Draycott has carried over into our tamer, tired world a strong, strange sense of how original, gorgeous and natural this old poem can be.’ – David Morley, Poetry Review
Following her T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Over, Jane Draycott’s fourth collection, The Occupant, illuminates the quiet intricacies and brief intimacies of urban life. In the National Gallery, a gardener steals part of a still-life canvas to replant in his own garden; on a winter train a commuter imagines his braver, doppelgänger as a firefighter; in an abandoned sanatorium, a grand piano dreams of former days, ‘rose-spotted paintwork peeling softly, half-moon fanlights rising, sinking’, waiting for anyone to return. At the heart of these imagined scenes the long title poem, ‘The Occupant’, draws on settings proposed but left unwritten by Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff in his great 1934 modernist narrative Awater. In the stifling summer air, Draycott’s occupant trawls the streets of an unnamed city, while ‘at tills and kiosks police post notices, ‘Missing: Have you seen this wind?’”
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