First time novelist Patrick McGuinness is one of the Man Booker dozen on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2011 for fiction announced today.

The Last Hundred Days a literary spy thriller and novel of place, is set in 1989 Bucharest, in the last days of Ceasescu and creates a world of intensity and ravaged beauty as the demolition squads race to destroy the old city and replace it with a sinister Stalinist Legoland. Into this paranoia walks a young English student with a damaged past and an uncertain future to take up a job he never applied for and whose duties are never made clear. He finds dissidents, party apparatchiks, black-marketeers, diplomats, spies and ordinary Romanians, all watching each other as Europe’s most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame.

“We are absolutely delighted for Patrick,” said Seren fiction editor Penny Thomas. “This is a stunning debut novel and we are so pleased that it has been recognised by the Man Booker judges. It’s also excellent news for a small independent Welsh press such as Seren.’

The full longlist is:

• Julian Barnes  The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan’s Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child
• Stephen Kelman  Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• AD Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• DJ Taylor Derby Day

Patrick McGuinness, poet and Professor or Literature at Oxford University, lived in Romania in the years leading up to the revolution.

The Last Hundred Days is available at www.serenbooks.com at £8.99

TONY CURTIS LAUNCHES REAL SOUTH PEMBROKESHIRE
Join Tony Curtis at the Oriel Queens Gallery, Narberth this Saturday (20th August) for the official launch of the latest addition to the Seren Real Series. 12pm – 2pm with a talk at 1pm. Refreshments. More…
THE LAST HUNDRED DAYS BY PATRICK MCGUINNESS LONG-LISTED FOR MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2011
Patrick McGuinness’s debut novel has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011. The Last Hundred Days is on the longlist with 12 other titles. More…
FORWARD PRIZE SHORTLIST
Nerys Williams Sound Archive and Judy Brown Loudness, both shortlisted for the Forward Prize ‘Best First Collection’ 2011. More…
GRAHAM MORT WINS EDGE HILL UNIVERSITY SHORT STORY PRIZE 2011
Graham Mort scooped the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2011, with his collection Touch. The winner was announced at Blackwells, Charing Cross Road in London. More…

Writing King Kong by Robert Seatter

It’s where I stop in my daily walk,
at the corner of 5th Avenue, 33rd and 34th St.,
budge that obstacle against my daily sun,
blink away its shadow.  The Empire State Building –
just a giant toy, a large crick in my neck.
A version of that ceaseless night train
clattering along its broken tracks… another train,
another robbed and sleepless hour.
All the things that elude me stay in my mind,
stick to my pen. Love given is forgotten, a bed I lie on
to dream my dreams of somewhere else,
but that girl in the penthouse, on Hollywood Blvd.,
with her faraway small teeth that make her
faraway perfect smile, sharp as a photograph,
I could carry forever in my suit breast pocket;
that elusive novel inscribed with gold letters,
‘Merian C. Cooper’ along its spine,
which waits in the bookstore on 33rd East, 17th St.,
it never flickers out inside the dark;
or that sleep of mine…

So I’ll move his black arms to open the latch
of her doll’s house window,
push the tallest tower into a puff of dust,
or – before that – make this detour
to twitch the train off its airfix bridge.
Now there’s sleep and sky and her perfect smile
for me.  Could I write it any better?

Writing King Kong is available to buy at www.serenbooks.com

The Forward Prize shortlist has been announced, and we here at Seren, are thrilled to see two of our poetry titles on the shortlist for ‘Best First Collection’ 2011.
Both Sound Archive by Nerys Williams and Loudness by Judy Brown find themselves shortlisted along with another four poets. 
Sound Archive is a strikingly original first collection of poems. Using formal strategies similar to modernist painting: abstraction, dislocation, surrealist juxtaposition, the poet conjures a complex music, intriguing narratives, and poems full of atmosphere that query identity, gender, and the dream of art as a vehicle for emotion and meaning. 
Nerys Williams is originally from Pen-Y-Bont, Carmarthen in West Wales. A recent winner of the Ted McNulty Poetry Prize, she lectures in American Literature at University College, Dublin.
“Sound Archive is an innovative volume..”– The Irish Times.
Video of Nerys Williams reading from Sound Archive
Judy Brown’s beautiful first collection Loudness, is a straightforward mannerand a gift for ironic humour belie the artful complexities and the exacting observations evident in her work. Loudness will be available to buy at the end of September 2011.
Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and has lived in Northumbria, Cumbria and Hong Kong. She has studied English Literature at Cambridge and Newcastle-upon Tyne and now lives between London (where her ‘day job’ is working part-time as a lawyer) and Derbyshire. She has won the Poetry London and Manchester Festival Poetry prizes and she has placed in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and others. She is also the author of a prize-winning pamphlet, Pillars of Salt.
The Forward Prize for Best First Collection shortlist:
Rachael Boast Sidereal
Judy Brown Loudness
Nancy Gaffield Tokaido Road
Ahren Warner Confer
John Whale Waterloo Teeth
Nerys Williams Sound Archive
The Forward Prize Best Collection shortlist:
John Burnside  Black Cat Bone
David Harsent Night
Geoffrey Hill Clavics
Michael Longley A Hundred Doors 
D Nurkse Voices Over Water  
Sean O’Brien November 
The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in memory of Michael Donaghy shortlist:
R. F. Langley To a Nightingale
Alan Jenkins Southern Rail (The Four Students) 
Sharon Olds Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend
Jo Shapcott Bees
Berg by Hilary Menos (Seren 2010) was winner of ‘Best First Collection’ 2010.

Congratulations to Graham Mort who won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011 for the collection Touch (Seren). Mort was unveiled as winner at a special awards ceremony at the Blackwells Bookshop in Charing Cross Road.  Touch is set from the heat of Africa to the warmth of France or the snow bound dales of northern England, the twenty-one stories displayed a deep sensitivity to both the natural world and to human relationships. Among the collection is the 2007 Bridport prize winning story ‘The Prince’.

Although Graham was unable to receive the first prize of £5,000 in person due to commitments to a project working with writers in Uganda he sent a message of thanks saying: “I’m sending this message from Kampala, and the title story, Touch begins here in Uganda and that seemed somehow fitting, my relief at winning was tinged with regret for the other finalists – all of them terrific writers, who also deserved to win. I’m glad that some of them will be picking up other prizes and I’m honoured to be listed among them… I’m sorry not to be at the ceremony, though not sorry to be here in Kampala working with Femrite, a women writers association who represent an emerging generation of Ugandan writers who don’t have this kind of opportunity to publish or win prizes. Their work is pitched at social conditions that they believe can be changed by the insights and understanding that literature creates. Thank you and cheers – have a great evening.”

Graham was born in Lancashire and studied English at Liverpool University. He worked as a mill labourer, dairy operative and psychiatric nurse before training as a teacher. He taught in schools, colleges, prisons, special education and psychiatric units before becoming a freelance writer. He also currently works as Director of Postgraduate Studies for the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. A specialist in distance learning, he also leads the Lancaster University/British Council African writers mentoring scheme, ‘Crossing Borders’.

Ailsa Cox, Co-ordinator of the Prize and Reader in Creative Writing and English at Edge Hill University, said: “The quality of the shortlist was phenomenal this year, with a range of highly acclaimed writers, from both ‘mainstream’ and independent presses such as Graham Mort’s publisher, Seren. Graham’s well-deserved success is a reminder of the high standard of small press publishing in the UK.”

Touch is available to buy at www.serenbooks.com
Graham Mort has a collection of poetry out this autumn with Seren, titled Cusp

Graham Mort scooped the Edge Hill Short Story prize 2011, with his collection Touch. The winner was announced at Blackwells, Charing Cross Road in London. Touch was shortlisted amongst some diverse names such as, Michele Roberts, Polly Samson. Helen Simpson and Tom Vowler. Mort’s collection includes a Bridport prize-winning short story “The Prince”. Graham is currently abroad and was unable to collect his £5,000, Penny Thomas (Fiction Editor at Seren) accepted it on his behalf.
Unfortunately Pascale Petit didn’t win Wales Book of the Year 2011 with her collection of poetry What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo. Pascale was on the shortlist with Cloud Road by John Harrison and Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds. Cloud Road (Parthian) won the £10,000 prize and each short-listed author received a £1,000 prize. What the Water Gave Me was on the short list for the T S Eliot Prize 2010.

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was born July 6 1907 and died at the age of 47.

Frida Kahlo led a traumatic life, she contracted Polio at the young age of six, and was seriously injured on a bus after the vehicle collided with a trolley car in 1925. As the result of the accident was a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken robs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot and a dislocated shoulder. Also, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. Frida suffered extreme pain for most of the remainder of her life.

In 1929 Frida Kahlo married the Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, whose work she admired.

Poet Pascale Petit has a collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo – this collection contains fifty-two poems on the voice of Frida Kahlo. Some are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.  More than just a verse biography, this collection explores how Kahlo transformed trauma into art after the artist’s near fatal bus accident. Petit, with her vivid style, her feel for nature and her understanding of pain and redemption, fully inhabits Kahlo’s world. Each poem is an evocation of “how art works on the pain spectrum”, laced with splashed of ferocious colour.

Petit’s collection was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2010 and is currently on the shortlist for Wales Book of the Year 2011.
A poem from What the Water Gave Me ‘My Birth’:

I swivel my emerging head
so you can recognise me
by my joined-up eyebrows.

My mother’s face is covered
with a sheet, so are her breasts –
they will never feed me.

Through the pink fog, I can see
with these baby painter’s eyes
how bare a room can be,

dominated as ours is by that picture
of the weeping Virgin.
Even my unhappiest paintings

will joyful. Look at how
I wear my mother’s body
like a regional dress –

its collar gripping my neck.
For now, her legs are my arms,
her sex is my necklace.

What the Water Gave Me is available at www.serenbooks.com

Some of the many review received for this wonderful collection:

“Pascale’s poems are as fresh as paint, and make you look all over again at Frida and her brilliant and tragic life.” — Jackie Kay, Observer Books of the Year

“Poems about paintings rarely set off fireworks, but this is ekphrasis with a difference: Petit speaks in Kahlo’s voice with eerie believability.” — Time Out

“This arresting ollection… exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.” — Ruth Padel, Guardian

Two Seren authors have been shortlisted for two prizes – and the winners are to be announced 7th July 2011.
Pascale Petit is shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011 with her poetry collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo. Petit’s latest collection was also shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize 2010.
Graham Mort is shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2011 with Touch, a collection of short stories. This collection includes the Bridport prize-winning story ‘The Prince’, Touch spans twenty years of short-story writing from author and poet Graham Mort.

Wales Book of the Year 2011 Ceremony is taking place on the 7th July 2011 at 7pm Cineworld, Cardiff.
Seren poet Pascle Petit is one of the three authors to be shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2011 prize. What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Some of the poems are close interpretations of Kahlo’s work, while others are parallels or version homages where Petit draws on her experience as a visual artist to create alternative ‘paintings’ with words.
Doors open 7pm, close at 7.25pm – ceremony starts promptly at 7.30pm. Literature Wales cannot guarantee admittance after 7.30pm.
www.literaturewales.org